The courtroom was silent but tense, the whir of camera lenses the only sound as dozens of journalists fixed their eyes on the bench. An extraordinary press conference had been called after the airing of a documentary late last year that claimed the top of Romania’s justice system was riddled with corruption.

Seated at the bench at the Bucharest court of appeal was its president, Liana Arsenie, flanked by her two vice-presidents. Behind them, in support, stood about 30 judges.

Then, Raluca Moroșanu, also a judge at the court, entered the room and asked to speak before the press conference began. “We are simply terrorised,” she said in a steady voice, breaking ranks with the leadership sitting beside her. “I can’t describe the atmosphere here, how toxic and tense it has become.”

Her declaration made, she swept out of the court in her robes, to a smattering of applause in the room and the stony expressions of her fellow judges.

Moroșanu’s intervention was made in support of a colleague who had been targeted after appearing in the documentary by Romanian outlet Recorder, which alleged that a network of senior magistrates and politicians had “captured” Romania’s justice system. “Everything he said is true and if anyone contradicts him, it is a lie,” she said in her address. Last month her colleague was referred for disciplinary proceedings over statements made in the documentary.

The film used rare prosecutors’ and judges’ testimonies to claim that the network used administrative manoeuvres to delay convictions in high-level corruption cases until they reached the statute of limitations.

The fallout was immediate: thousands of Romanians took to the streets and nearly 900 judges and prosecutors signed an open letter warning of “profound and systemic dysfunctions”. But six months on, meaningful reform has yet to materialise, and the allegations keep mounting.

Last month, the investigative outlets Rise Project and PressOne alleged that Lia Savonea – now head of the supreme court – had acquitted a convicted gangster of a seven-year robbery sentence while co-owning land with his uncle during her time as head of the Bucharest court of appeal 12 years ago, an alleged potential conflict of interest she did not declare. She has denied the allegations, saying they were part of an “obvious defamation campaign” against her “based on forced associations and speculation regarding people and situations that have no real connection”. The allegations had been “subjected to verification”, she said, with no wrongdoing found.

Earlier this month, the Romanian president, Nicușor Dan, deepened public disillusionment in the justice system by approving a controversial series of prosecutor appointments over objections from the judicial regulator and civil society.

Among those named was Marius Voineag, a former head of the national anti-corruption directorate – a figure Dan had criticised on the campaign trail and whom prosecutors in the Recorder documentary accused of intervening in sensitive investigations. Voineag denied wrongdoing and declined to comment.

The crisis is unfolding against an already volatile backdrop. In 2024, Romania’s constitutional court annulled a presidential election over alleged Russian interference, a decision that deepened public mistrust in the country’s institutions.

The cumulative toll is visible in the polls. A survey this year found that seven in 10 Romanians do not trust the justice system and more than half believe the law is not applied equally.

For Moroșanu, none of this is surprising. In an interview with the Guardian, she was frank about the scale of the crisis as she sees it. “We are now in the worst moment the Romanian justice system has been in my 26-year career,” she said. “The majority of magistrates are fair, competent and hardworking; what we see is not generalised corruption, but corruption at the top of the system.”

Moroșanu has been working as a judge for more than a quarter of a century and has spent 19 years at the Bucharest court of appeal, one of the country’s most important courts, which handles many final decisions in high-level corruption cases.

In recent years, a series of major corruption trials involving politicians and businessmen have collapsed after reaching the statute of limitations due to repeated delays in judicial proceedings and despite extensive evidence, including wiretaps of suspects appearing to admit wrongdoing.

“The justice system is in a deep crisis caused by the formation of groups within high-level courts, which have taken over administrative management power,” said Laura Ștefan, an anti-corruption expert with the Romanian think tank Expert Forum.

Andreea Pocotilă, one of the authors of the documentary, claimed that cases were repeatedly reassigned to new judging panels by court leadership just before rulings, forcing proceedings to restart and evidence to be reheard until they became time-barred.

Members of the superior council of magistrates, the guardian of judicial independence that supervises judicial careers, have been accused of being complicit. “Who is supposed to protect us from the guardian, though?” said Andrea Chiș, a former member of the council and a retired judge.

In a statement, the council rejected the allegations, saying Romania’s judiciary had been subjected to “an unprecedented assault” aimed at destroying its reputation through false accusations of systemic corruption. An internal inspection had confirmed none of the claims in the Recorder documentary, it added.

Chiş argued in a 2023 study that justice reforms concentrated power in the hands of court leadership by expanding their authority and weakening oversight, creating a pyramidal power structure. Despite criticism, the reforms led the EU to lift its rule-of-law monitoring mechanism.

“It was a mistake to lift the mechanism,” said Chiș. “It was not good for our justice system and it took away the pressure from those in power.”

Successive reforms have left no effective mechanism to prosecute corrupt magistrates, observers say, with accountability efforts yielding barely any convictions in the past years.“It’s a tacit agreement between politicians and senior magistrates to block accountability for corruption within the justice system, while politicians, in turn, are granted impunity,” said Ștefan.

As president of the supreme court and former head of the council of magistrates, Savonea has been accused of being a prominent part of this alleged power structure.

In a statement, Savonea said the allegations were “part of an orchestrated campaign of defamation and reputational harm, through serious distortion of factual realities and the association of narratives lacking any evidence”.

She added: “I also emphasise that there is no finding or imputation regarding any interference in the administration of justice on my part.

“In reality, these accusations do not rest on mere assertions – they rely on speculative interpretations that end up challenging the very institutional architecture of the judicial system. This architecture, however, has been built in accordance with the most rigorous European standards, including with regard to competition procedures and mechanisms for filling public positions, grounded in criteria of legality, transparency and meritocracy.”

Arsenie, head of the court of appeal, has also rejected the allegations. She has accused the journalists behind the documentary of “instigation against the constitutional order” – one of the most serious offences in the Romanian criminal code, roughly equivalent to sedition. She declined a Guardian interview request.

The anger has spilled into the streets. Raluca Kișescu, a marketing consultant who joined the protests last year, believes trust is eroding beyond repair. “A democracy without justice is a story with a tragic ending,” she said. “It feels like we’re mice in electric shock experiments: we get used to each shock from a new Recorder documentary, we comment on it with our friends and then it passes.”

Since speaking out, Moroșanu said she had been recused from two cases after fellow judges argued her public criticism of Arsenie showed a lack of empathy.

Still, she does not regret speaking out. “There’s still a chance that things might change if something happens this year,” she said, “but if nothing changes now, things will never change.”