A Romanian court has rejected a man's claim that he's alive, after he was officially registered as deceased.

A court spokeswoman said Friday that 63-year-old Constantin Reliu lost his case in the northeast city of Vasului because he appealed too late. The ruling is final.

Media reported Reliu went to Turkey in 1992 for work and lost contact with his Romanian family after July 1999.

Hearing no news from her husband, his wife managed to get a death certificate for him in 2016, thinking that he might have died in the August 1999 earthquake in northwestern Turkey.

In Turkey, he also has no official records other than his entry to the country in July 1999, prompting Romanian authorities to consider him dead.

Turkish authorities located Reliu this year with expired papers and deported him. When he arrived in Romania, he discovered he had been declared dead.

He was quoted as saying: "I am officially dead, although I'm alive, I have no income and because I am listed dead, I can't do anything."