Hundreds of thousands of Romanians protested at the beginning of February against a government decree that relaxed anti-graft legislation. Photo: Vadim Ghirda/AP.

Romania’s Senate is to discuss a bill that proposes jail terms of six months to three years for people challenging Romania’s “constitutional order”, prompting civic activists to claim that the ruling Social Democrat Party, PSD, may attempt to limit free speech.

The bill amending the penal code includes one article that says: “Action against people or assets by one of more individuals together, with the clear purpose to change the constitutional order, or to make it harder or prevent the state from exercising its power, is punishable with six months to three years of imprisonment”.

The initiator of the change, Social Democrat MP Todor Ciuhodaru, said he wrote the law before the December 11 elections, in order to target “Hungarian separatists” seeking more self-rule in Transylvania, where they are a large minority.

When the bill reached the Senate this week, Elena Calistru, an activist involved in February’s anti-corruption protests, shared it on Facebook, saying the implications would be even more dangerous than the MP intended.

“I have to remind everybody that PSD spokesman [Adrian Dobre] said that [anti-corrution] protesters prevented the government for working properly. So be careful. Protesting might soon become a crime,” she said.

Ciuhodaru insists his target are the ethnic Hungarians who he believes are attacking the “essence of the Romanian state”.

“My bill does not target the protesters in Victoriei Square … I am against extremism and against those who attack with revisionist and separatist demonstrations the essence of the Romanian state,” he told Digi 24 TV station.

He supported his bill by recalling demonstrations in the town of Targu Mures asking for autonomy for Szecklerland, a region in central Romania inhabited by a majority of ethnic Hungarians.

He also noted the activity of Romanian Hungarian MEPs Laszlo Tokes and Csaba Sogor, who also call for the autonomy of Szecklerland.

Such acts “oblige the Romanian parliament to adopt this law which regulates that, in Romania, freedom, democracy and the right to free movement and free speech cannot go as far as allowing extremist, separatist and revisionist approaches”.

Ciuhodaru has attacked Hungarian ethnic agitation in Transylvania before, complaining about the sight of Szecklerland flags on buildings in the Covasna and Harghita counties in 2013.

Activists say restricting constitutional rights is a step back to dictatorship, however.

Writer and former dissident Mihai Sora said such bills may take Romania down an already known road.

“All dictatorships start the same way. There is no more perverted way to begin than by saying there is a legislative void to gag people and outlaw other organizations or opposition parties,” Sora said.

PSD’s spokesman Adrian Dobre said that the party, which has signed a political alliance with the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, does not share Ciuhodaru’s views, and its MPs will reject the bill.