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Tens of thousands people protested against amendments to Justice Laws
Around 50,000protesters braving snow joined an anti-corruption march in the Romanian capital of Bucharest on Saturday evening.
Thousands more demonstrators also took to the streets in large cities across the country, including in the Cluj, Timisoara, Constanta, Bacau, Sibiu and Iasi.
Euronews’ Hans Von der Brelie talked to protesters in and around Bucharest during the demonstration.
Protesters were upset about government moves that they said would put the justice system partially under political control.
The legislation has been passed by Romanian MPs and is currently with President Klaus Iohannis for approval.
Protesters were also against moves to decriminalise some lower-level corruption offences - a battle that has been going on for a year.
Saturday evening, protesters gathered on both sides of University Square, near the fountain and in front of the National Theater. The protest area was surrounded with protection fences, but around 18:30, the protesters entered the road, blocking the traffic in the area after forcing the protection fences installed by the Gendarmerie
The protesters are chanting slogans such as: "Justice, not corruption," and "Thieves." Moreover, demonstrators are blowing vuvuzelas, waving tricolour flags and some of them are whistling.
The protesters display placards reading: "Everyone for justice," "Out of love for Romania," "#Rezist," "Theft and stupidity rule Romania" and "Brasov via Madagascar."
Clashes between protesters trying to get out of the underpass and gendarmes occurred in the University Passage.The metro station and the University Passage were crowded and people chanting "PSD [the Social Democratic Party], the red plague."
The Deputy Chairman of the Defense Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, liberal Ovidiu Raetchi, is announcing that he will demand at the beginning of the parliamentary session of that the Defense Committees analyze how the Gendarmerie managed the protests, pointing out that Saturday's event, in which a gendarme was filmed while hitting demonstrators, must be objectively sanctioned.
"I will request that in the first week of February, at the beginning of the session, after the steps to install the Government, we make an analysis in the National Defense and Public Order Committees of the Parliament of the way the Gendarmerie handled the civic protests in recent months. Yesterday's incident, in which a gendarme punches demonstrators, must be analyzed and sanctioned objectively, out of the possible protection networks that we have started to discover in the Interior Ministry after the case of the paedophile policeman," the PNL deputy wrote on Sunday on Facebook.