Winning a case against a permit refusal has a weakness anyone who has been through it can see. The judgment annuls the act, but the request is filed again, with the same authority, which can answer again. The Urban Planning Code has a short article for exactly that moment. I think it is one of the best-designed in the part of the code devoted to administrative litigation.
The text, in two paragraphs
Article 363 is titled Actions brought against the unjustified refusal of a request.
Paragraph (1) starts from a precise situation: the administrative act refusing a request without justification has been annulled by the court, and the court has also ordered that the request be resolved, within the limits of what it was asked to decide. If the same person then files a new request with the same object, the authority that issued the annulled act cannot refuse it on the same grounds.
Paragraph (2) closes the second exit. In the same case, the authority cannot justify refusing the new request on the basis of changes made to the spatial and urban planning documentation since the date the annulled act was issued.
The conditions are read together
All of them must be met, and each can be missing in practice. The refusal must have been annulled by a court, not merely challenged. The judgment must also have ordered that the request be resolved. The new request must come from the same applicant and have the same object.
The last condition strikes me as the most fragile. The text does not say what the same object means when the project has changed in the meantime, even slightly. My reading, and it is only a reading, is that any change to the solution opens the question of whether it is still the same request. Anyone who wants the article’s protection has a serious reason to refile exactly the project that was refused. There is another route too: the judgment that orders the request to be resolved binds the authority itself, and enforcing it may be quicker than refiling. Article 363 protects the new request as well; which route fits your case is a question for a lawyer.
Why paragraph (2) matters more
Paragraph (1) stops repetition. Paragraph (2) stops circumvention, and this is where I think the real effect lies. Time passes between a refusal and a final judgment, and in that time local rules can change. Without paragraph (2), a new planning rule would have been a new ground, and perfectly usable. With it, changes made to the urban planning documentation after the date of the annulled act can no longer be invoked as a ground for refusal.
I do not know how courts and city halls will apply these two paragraphs. What can be said already is that they give weight to something another article requires.
The link with stated reasons
Article 275 paragraph (2) requires the authority to set out, in the refusal act, the reasons in law and in fact. We wrote about that in a refusal comes with reasons, in writing. Article 363 turns those reasons into a limit for the future: if the grounds of the first refusal are written precisely, it can be checked whether a second refusal repeats them. A vague refusal would be harder to compare, which is why I think a complete statement of reasons is worth asking for from the very first answer.
The road to court
Article 360 paragraph (1) refers the right to bring a case before the administrative court to Legea nr. 554/2004. The time limits and procedure there are not set out in the Urban Planning Code, so we do not reproduce them here.
Paragraph (2) of the same article shows that the road runs both ways. Building, demolition, modification or regularisation permits issued in breach of the law can be annulled by the administrative court. And the right in paragraph (1) belongs to any person, under the conditions of Law 554/2004, that is, one who shows that the permit harms a right or legitimate interest of theirs. So also to the neighbour who challenges your permit. What happens to a construction already built when its permit falls is the subject of the permit is annulled, the house is built.
Article 362 paragraph (2) adds a detail of pace: if the court has suspended the enforcement of the act, hearings in the annulment case are set at intervals of no more than 15 calendar days.
A court can also annul an urban plan, not just a permit. Which plan applies after that is explained in PUG annulled in court. The ordinary issuing procedure, which you hope not to go through twice, is on the page about the building permit.
This article is analysis, not legal advice. Provisions are cited from Legea 169/2026, published in Monitorul Oficial no. 661 of 10 August 2026. Check your own situation with the issuing authority. Romanian legal terms are kept in the original, because the Romanian text is the one that governs.