Is a law "discovered" by far-right Romanian senator Diana Sosoaca enabling the state to separate children from their families and was such a bill passed in secret? No, that's not true: Sosoaca is continuing a disinformation trend previously debunked by Lead Stories, about a new law she claimed was regulating how children were going to be taken away from low-income families. Now, she says a similar law existed all along.
The claim originated from a video (archived here) published on TikTok by user @ichim.stefanel.vasilica4 on August 14, 2023, under the title "News BOMB that sheds light into the scandal on child protection laws" (All translations by Lead Stories). It opened:
Senator Diana Sosoaca discovered another law was ALREADY PASSED (Plx 457/2019/2021) that legislates private child protection systems (Barnevernet style)!
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Aug 15 11:35:54 2023 UTC)
Sosoaca, however, did not discover something new or incriminating. In the video, she makes the claim that PL-x 457 was initiated in 2019 and quietly passed in 2021, and that the bill makes it easier for the state to separate children from their families, making an analogy with the Norwegian Barnevernet system.
But that bill she mentions contains a series of changes brought to the even older Law 272/2004 on the Protection and Promotion of Children's Rights and is in no way establishing unreasonable rules on separating children from their parents. The law tackles a variety of issues relating to children's well-being, from how to prevent and punish bullying in schools, to the rights of refugee children, to how to care for children whose parents have left the country in search of work.
In addition, the law was not passed in secret. It was passed publicly through and discussed in Parliament, as well as several commissions, consulted with the government and the president, and was implemented after a process that took two years.
