Is it legal to record a meeting in Romania?

Cod penal Art. 226, Violarea vieții private. Paragraph (1): an infringement of private life, fără drept, without right, by photographing, capturing or recording images, listening by technical means or înregistrarea audio of a person who is in a dwelling or a room or outbuilding belonging to it, sau a unei convorbiri private, or of a private conversation, is punished by one to six months' imprisonment or a fine.

Paragraph (2) punishes disclosing, disseminating, presenting or transmitting those sounds, conversations or images without right, by three months to two years or a fine. Paragraph (3) makes it a complaint offence.

How it is framed is what makes Romania different. Around the private life of a person, not around eavesdropping on others' conversations and not around the secrecy of a transmission. It names audio recording as a mode of commission and a private conversation as an alternative object alongside a person in a dwelling, so the offence is not confined to the home: a private conversation in an office, a meeting room or a video call is squarely within Art. 226(1).

Paragraph (5) is the heaviest penalty in this region and it is aimed at exactly this architecture: placing, without right, technical means of audio or video recording, for the purpose of committing the acts in (1) and (2), carries one to five years, ten times the maximum for the recording itself. An always-on transcriber is a placed means of audio recording in the ordinary sense of those words. The reading that saves it is that (5) requires the purpose of committing the acts in (1) and (2), and if the participant exception means the conduct is not those acts then there is no such purpose. That reading is ours, from the text, and we did not find it stated anywhere. It is the second thing to ask a Romanian lawyer about.

And Art. 302 is the gap not to gloss over. Art. 302(2) punishes intercepting, without right, a conversation or communication carried out by telephone or by any electronic means of communication, by six months to three years or a fine. Art. 302(6) punishes holding or making, without right, means specific to intercepting or recording communications. Art. 302 has no participant exception: its paragraph (5) exempts only capturing an offence and capturing facts of public interest.

Qualified yes, and participation alone is not a defence. Art. 226(4)(a) is drafted with two conditions, not one: the person "a participat la întâlnirea cu persoana vătămată" at which the material was captured, and "dacă justifică un interes legitim", if they justify a legitimate interest.

Read the second condition carefully, because it inverts the usual structure. In the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Poland the participant simply falls outside the offence. In Romania the participant is inside Art. 226(1) and gets out through an exception they must justify. The burden and the framing are both different, and any summary that says "in Romania a participant may record" without the legitimate-interest condition is wrong in a way that matters.

What satisfies un interes legitim in practice we cannot tell you: no Romanian decision or commentary was opened, and the phrase is the single most important undetermined term on this page.

Two further points. The exception covers the disclosure limb too, because Art. 226(4) is drafted as an exception to the act generally and its (a) refers to material captured at the meeting, which is the material of both (1) and (2). And the complaint requirement is a practical mitigation rather than a legal defence: nothing happens unless a participant complains, and any one participant can start it.

Consent is not what Art. 226(4)(a) asks for, and it is still the recommended route, because consent removes fără drept, without right, from Art. 226(1) altogether rather than leaving you to justify a legitimate interest under an exception. It also answers Art. 302, which has no participant exception at all.

Use the long form and get an answer.

Before we start: I record my meetings so I can write up notes afterwards. It runs on my laptop, the audio is transcribed on this machine and never uploaded, and the audio itself is not saved anywhere, only the text, in a file I keep. Is everyone alright with that? If anyone would rather I didn't, say so now and I'll turn it off.

GDPR applies as well, and the analysis is the ordinary European one: a meeting recording is personal data about every identifiable speaker, a transcript without speaker labels is still personal data, the household exemption is read narrowly and a work meeting has a direct connection to a professional activity, you need a lawful basis, and Art. 13 wants the information at the time the data are obtained, which for an always-on recorder means before the substance of the meeting. The European framework covers all of that once rather than on every country page.

Romania is the hardest of its region for an employer rollout, by a wide margin, and for two reasons.

Prior information must be complete and explicit: informarea prealabilă obligatorie, completă și în mod explicit, under Law 190/2018 Art. 5(b).

Consultation of the union or employees' representatives is expressly required before introduction, and it is a condition of lawfulness rather than a procedural step: Law 190/2018 Art. 5(c). Fail it and the processing is not permitted.

And Law 190/2018 Art. 5(e) sets a 30-day storage cap. If Art. 5 applies, that is the opposite of what a meeting archive is for. Whether it applies to an on-device audio transcriber is the pivot, and it is unresolved.

ANSPDCP, the Romanian supervisory authority. Nothing specific on meeting recording or on the meaning of a legitimate interest under Art. 226(4)(a) was opened in our research. That is a gap, and given how much turns on that phrase it is the one most worth closing for Romania.

Start with what does not help, because it is what our own positioning tempts us into claiming. Earkeep transcribes on your own device, never writes the audio to disk and sends nothing anywhere. On the criminal layer in Romania that changes nothing at all. A recording made without the other speakers' consent is the same act whether it was processed on your laptop or uploaded to somebody's cloud, because the provision is about making the recording rather than about where it ends up.

Where the architecture genuinely helps is data protection: no transfer, no third party in the chain, no processor agreement to sign, and nothing to reconcile if someone asks you to delete what was said. And in the conversation itself, "it stays on my laptop and the audio is never saved" is a shorter thing to explain than what a cloud notetaker requires, which makes the agreement easier to actually obtain.

Earkeep announces itself to nobody. There is no bot in the participant list and no banner on anyone else's screen, so where the announcement is what makes the recording lawful, the whole of it depends on you saying something. What the app gives you is somewhere to go when the answer is no: a pause from the live edge that releases the microphone and the system audio stream, so the operating system's own recording indicator visibly goes dark; a never-record marking for a meeting on a connected calendar; and a purge that takes the lines out of the file on your own disk with no server copy anywhere. It does not make any recording lawful, and no tool can.

• Cod penal Art. 226 (Violarea vieții private)
• Codul penal, Legea 286/2009, the canonical database (not reachable in our research)
• GDPR, EUR-Lex

• European recording laws: the four layers, the controller question, and all 32 countries.
• Telling people you're recording: the scripts, and the three ways to stop.
• Private by design: why the audio never leaves your computer.

This page is legal information, not legal advice. It summarises provisions and guidance rather than replacing them, and we are not lawyers. If the answer matters, ask someone who can be held to their answer.