Gold cyanidation in Romania

In 2005, a number of 12 Greater Romania Party Senators (among which Gheorghe Funar) proposed a law project which banned the usage of cyanides for gold and silver extraction in Roșia Montană.^[2] The law was rejected in the Senate in November 2005 and in the Chamber of Deputies in March 2006. The government also opposed it arguing that the law referred to a special case.^[2]

A year later, Funar and Peter Eckstein of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, usually bitter rivals in the political scene of Cluj, created a new law which was more general and avoided to talk about Roșia Montană. The project was nevertheless rejected in the autumn of 2008, meeting the opposition of the Democratic-Liberal Party.^[2]

A third attempt to ban gold cyanidation was registered in the Senate in June 2013, proposed by non-affiliated deputy Remus Cernea, being supported by other 38 senators and deputies of all parties, many of which from the government coalition. The only MP from the Democratic-Liberal Party to support the law was the deputy Teodor Paleologu.^[2]

The 1971 Certej dam failure led to the deaths of 89 people after a failure of the dam of the tailings pond.

The 2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill occurred when a dam (operated by Aurul, a joint-venture of the Australian company Esmeralda Exploration and the Romanian government) holding 100,000 tonnes of cyanide-contaminated tailings spilled into the Someș River and from there into the Tisza and Danube. The spill created a large-scale environmental disaster that has been called the worst environmental disaster in Europe since the Chernobyl disaster.^[3]