June 13, 2018

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Newsroom, 13.06.2018, 14:26

INVITATION Romania’s Prime
Minister Viorica Dancila has been invited to present before Parliament on June
20th the stage of the preparation process for Romania’s taking over
the half-yearly rotating presidency of the EU Council in January 2019. The
debates occasioned by the event could provide a considerable support in the
government’s process of drawing up and implementing the first blueprint of a
presidency’s working road map – the head of the Romanian government has added.
The Romanian official believes the EU Council’s presidency will be an
opportunity for Romania to prove its ability to contribute in a significant
manner, through a powerful vision and a relevant administrative capacity, to
the process of kick-starting the European project.

WB Over 80% of Romania’s
under-performing schools are located in the country’s rural areas, with a
graduation rate in the tertiary education that exceeds 25.6%, the EU’s lowest,
a WB report on development in 2018 says. According to the document, made public
in Bucharest on Wednesday by the WB lead economist and co-author of the report,
Halsey Rogers, the differences between the dropout rates are contrasting; the
rural dropout rate stays at 26.6%, whereas the dropout rate in the cities is
around 6.2%. Romania needs to invest more intelligently in education, the
report also points out. The World Bank recommends competence assessment in
Romania’s case as employers are presently deploring the shortage of key
social-emotional competences, such as motivation, teamwork and responsibility.
Graduates from Romania’s higher education system are generally perceived as
owners of exclusively theoretical knowledge while graduates from the country’s
vocational training system have only developed obsolete competences.

TALKS The Foreign
Ministry in Bucharest has announced that it held talks with Ukrainian officials
on the searches recently conducted at the Romanian Cultural Centre ‘Eudoxiu
Hurmuzachi’ in Cernauti, western Ukraine. Emphasis was laid during the talks on
the observation of the rights of the Romanian minority living in this country.
During the talks hosted by the Foreign Ministry on Monday, the Ukrainian
ambassador in Bucharest Oleksandr Bankov was requested additional information
on how the aforementioned searches had been conducted – Romanian diplomacy
sources have informed. Bucharest has called on the Ukrainian authorities to
ensure the observation of the Romanian minority’s rights and avoid any actions,
which could lead to their violation or to their being interpreted as elements
of intimidation. These specifications come after Ukraine’s Security Service
(SBU) has announced that it is conducting investigations involving the board of
the cultural center on what it describes as ‘appeals to the violation of the
country’s territorial integrity’. Roughly half a million ethnic Romanians are
living in the neighboring country, most of them on the territories annexed by
the Soviet Union in 1940 following an ultimatum and taken over by Ukraine as a
successor state in 1991.

COMMEMORATION Romania is these days
commemorating 28 years since the violent events, which are now known as the
Miners’ Raid to Bucharest over June 13th-15th 1990. The
raid put an end to a large-scale protest rally
against the left-wing government, which had come to power after the
demise of the communist regime in Romania. Against the background of some
violent events in the capital Bucharest, which the army troops had already
managed to contain, Ion Iliescu, the country’s president at the time, invoked an
attempted coup by the far right political forces and called on the citizens to
defend Romania’s democratic institutions. Miners from the Jiu Valley in central
Romania arrived in Bucharest and stormed the University building, the head
offices of the opposition parties as well as some independent publications.
Four people were killed and over one thousand abusively arrested. Romania’s
international image was seriously tarnished by the violent events in 1990. A
court file on the Miners’ Raid was reopened in 2015 and the General
Prosecutor’s Office sent to court several high-ranking officials such as the
country’s former president Ion Iliescu, former Premier Petre Roman and the head
of the country’s Intelligence Service, Virgil Magureanu. One of the charges they
are facing is crimes against humanity.

(translated by bill)