8.  The applicants are Romanian nationals of Roma origin who, during the events which gave rise to the present case, lived in the village of Bolintin Deal, Giurgiu County. 9.  Following the killing, on the night of 6/7 April 1991, of a non-Roma from Bolintin-Deal by a Roma villager, a crowd of more than two thousand non‑Roma inhabitants from the same village and from the neighbouring village, together with the priest and the mayor, burned and otherwise destroyed the applicants’ houses and their contents.
As a consequence, the entire Roma community fled their houses and were left homeless for a month. 10.  When, on 7 May 1991 the evacuated Roma villagers tried to negotiate their return, the non‑Roma community gathered together again and burned four more houses belonging to Roma. The applicants, who were helped by the police to flee the village in a windowless military van, lost all their belongings while being evacuated. The attacks against the applicants continued on the following days and the Roma inhabitants were denied access to the village, the orthodox church and the cemetery. 11.  It appears that the applicants have not returned to Bolintin Deal. They have had to change their addresses several times and now have no legal documents attesting their actual residence. Some of them have been contacted by the mayor of Bolintin Deal with offers to purchase their land and, in desperate need of money, have accepted the offers. 12.  In April 1991 the applicants filed a criminal complaint with the Giurgiu County Prosecutor’s Office. An investigation was started and the applicants joined the proceedings as civil parties, seeking compensation for their destroyed houses and belongings. 13.  On 17 October 1996 the criminal trial commenced, in conjunction with a civil action for damages. The Bucharest District Court gave its judgment on 18 May 1998. It convicted thirteen individuals of unlawful entry into a person’s home and destruction of property and gave them each a three to six months’ suspended prison sentence.
The District Court awarded the applicants compensation for their houses; it based its ruling on an expert report of 1994 and rejected the applicants’ request to take the inflation rate into account. It then halved the amount of the compensation, on the ground of the mitigating circumstances of provocation. The District Court did not afford any redress for the movable property, as it considered that its existence, and subsequent destruction during the incidents, had not been proven. 14.  The appeals lodged by the applicants were rejected and the judgment upheld, first by the Bucharest County Court on 4 January 1999 and then by the Bucharest Court of Appeal in a final decision of 27 May 1999. 15.  The applicants were referred to as “gypsies” (in Romanian “ţigani”) on several occasions in the court decisions above.