A Romanian court on Monday started the trial of Ion Ficioru, former commander of a Communist-era labour camp, who is charged with crimes against humanity for the deaths of 103 political prisoners half a century ago.

Ficior, now 86, was deputy commander and then commander of the Periprava labor camp, in a remote Danube Delta village. He faces at least 15 years in prison if found guilty.

Ficior allegedly was involved in beating detainees, depriving them of medical treatment and exposing them to extreme ecold.

More than 50 years have passed since the prisoners died, but under Romanian law, there is no time limit on prosecuting grave crimes.

Ficior is the second former prison commander in Romania to be charged with crimes against humanity.

Last September, prosecutors charged 87-year-old Alexandru Visinescu for his management of the Ramnicu Sarat prison from 1956 to 1963, where Romania’s elite were incarcerated.

Six political prisoners, including a former diplomat and a party leader, died as a result of beatings and poor conditions there.

Both men have pleaded innocent.

The last Romanian to be convicted of genocide was the former communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who was hurriedly tried and executed in 1989.

After decades of denial, Romania has finally started to try to punish Communist-era crimes. In April, the Romanian Institute for Investigating the Crimes of Communism, IICCMER, published a list of 35 people allegedly involved in detaining and torturing dissidents during Communist times.

Chilling details have emerged about the torments that guards inflicted on political prisoners in the Communist gulags.

Reports have suggested that around 120,000 of a total of 617,000 political prisoners died in the gulags. Most were politicians, priests, writers and diplomats but some were also peasants.

The investigating committee is currently concentrating on political crimes from the early 1950s until 1964, when a general amnesty was declared.

Most of the survivors of the camps died before getting justice, but some 2,800 of them are still alive.