Radio România Internațional

Tag: measures

  • EU-wide mobilisation against COVID-19

    EU-wide mobilisation against COVID-19

    The EU leaders took part on Tuesday night in a conference call aimed at looking at possible solutions to the large-scale coronavirus crisis looming ahead.



    After the conference, the European Council president Charles Michel spoke about a number of priorities agreed on by all participants. First comes protecting citizen safety, through measures based on scientific information and medical sources, followed by ensuring the medical equipment and preventing shortages. Other priorities include promoting scientific research, including the development of a vaccine, and response to the economic and social consequences, among other things by making European rules more flexible.



    Taking part in the video call, president Klaus Iohannis called for solidarity and mutual help, in an address broadcast on radio and television:



    Klaus Iohannis: “We must face the facts: the risk of pandemic remains high, and fighting the coronavirus requires coordinated national, European and worldwide efforts. We held a conference call and all EU leaders discussed the developments in their respective countries. Protecting the European citizens is our top priority, and we discussed the measures that have to be taken at present. We all agree that it is absolutely necessary for us to coordinate our efforts to counter the effects of the coronavirus disease. It is only by means of joint measures that help prevent the virus from spreading further, that we will manage to successfully handle this crisis, and it is only together that we will manage to prevent its severe effects on the European economies.



    The European Parliament also discussed the current COVID-19 situation and a coordinated European response. MEPs pleaded for solidarity, for investments in research and for rethinking the European pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries. Masks, testing kits and respiratory equipment should be produced in the EU and made available to all Member States, MEPs said, among other things. The Romanian MEP Nicolae Stefanuta (Renew Europe), said:



    Nicolae Stefanuta: “Today we need joint stocks of medical supplies, we need to mobilise the healthcare personnel in the Union to the most affected areas, but we also need leadership, quick dissemination of trustworthy information. Our response to the current crisis is not to reduce exports, the answer is not ‘sink or swim. This crisis concerns all of us, and only together can we overcome it.



    Although still in the 2-figure zone, the number of COVID-19 cases in Romania is growing. In order to prevent the unwanted scenario of an uncontrolled spreading of the disease, the authorities have closed down public and private kindergartens, schools and high schools until March 22, and the period may be extended. Universities will also stay closed until the end of March. The government has decided to earmark additional funds to the Health Ministry in order to prepare hospitals to receive coronavirus patients and to secure proper care for chronic patients.



    A special issue has to do with the Romanians living abroad, particularly in severely-hit Italy, who are prompted by fear to come back home. According to the interim interior minister Marcel Vela, the Romanian and foreign citizens coming from regions with coronavirus outbreaks and reaching Romanias western border are escorted by police and gendarmes to quarantine facilities.


    (translated by: Ana-Maria Popescu)

  • Romanian authorities on alert for coronavirus

    Romanian authorities on alert for coronavirus

    The newly found coronavirus, discovered in China, is not as strong as the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which caused an epidemic that killed over 750 people in 2002-2003, but it proves to be more contagious, as it is able to spread even before any symptoms appear in patients, Chinese health officials announced on Sunday. The new disease, which emerged in Wuhan in December, has already contaminated thousands of people in China, and the death toll is rising by the day.



    The Chinese officials are trying to ease away fears, explaining that whereas the death rate with SARS was around 10%, the rate for the new coronavirus is lower. There is no need to panic, but nor should people be careless: for the most part of the patients, the symptoms are benign and treatable, and many of the people who died over the past 2 months had been already suffering from other diseases and were over 65.



    The symptoms include severe coughing, fever and breathing difficulties. Antibiotics and antiviral medication are useless. The patients must be hospitalized and may receive treatment for the internal organs, but recovery depends largely on the state of their immune system. For the time being there is no vaccine, but the virus strain has been isolated by Chinese researchers, which is the first step in creating a vaccine.



    The countries having already confirmed coronavirus cases include Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Nepal, Australia, the USA, Canada and France.



    In Romania, travelers coming from this geographic region are monitored. Alerts have been issued in Cluj (north-west), Timisoara (west), Constanta (south-east) and Bucharest, but by Monday noon they had been disconfirmed, according to a recently established inter-ministry committee for the monitoring and management of possible coronavirus infections, which includes experts from the Healthcare Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry and Transport Ministry.



    Special measures are in place with respect to the 25 members of a traditional music group currently in Beijing, who are due to land in Bucharests Otopeni Airport on Tuesday afternoon. As regards other musicians, who were on a 40-day tour in China and have already returned to Romania, county healthcare authorities are checking on them on a daily basis.



    Last week authorities decided to purchase thermal scanners for airports, to detect passengers whose body temperature is above 38 degrees Celsius. Fliers and billboards disseminate information, and permanent medical units are on duty in airports. Unfortunately, however, the Romanian authorities also have to deal, at the same time, with the common, seasonal flu, which is already making victims in the country.


    (translated by: Ana-Maria Popescu)

  • The state of infrastructure in Romania and road safety

    The state of infrastructure in Romania and road safety

    The car crash that occurred Saturday in Ialomiţa county, in southern Romania, in which 10 people were killed after a truck hit a minibus coming from the opposite direction, gives a new warning signal related to road safety. Actually, Romania is on top position within the EU in terms of traffic related deaths.



    The investigation in the Ialomiţa tragedy is currently under way. Some sources say the truck was running at the legal speed limit and the driver observed the rest stops. Still there is suspicion that he might have fallen asleep or used the mobile phone while driving. Starting on Saturday, the use of mobile phones while driving will be punished by big fines and even the suspension of the driving license. Also traffic checks have been announced to verify the tachographs that register the driving and resting time of transporters.



    The transport minister Răzvan Cuc said he would propose the introduction of devices for scanning drivers’ retina, meant to identify tiredness and warn drivers when they cross the line separating the lanes. According to the vice-president of the National Union of Road Transporters in Romania, Constantin Isac, further prevention measures are needed which do not regard professional drivers alone.



    Constantin Isac: “Bucharest’s ring road and also the ring roads of all the big cities are actually the big problem, and I’m referring to all the facilities a parking should provide: toilets, hygiene areas, guards. It’s not only drivers and the infrastructure to be blamed, but also the way traffic control is undertaken.”



    An adviser on traffic safety issues and a former deputy director of the Traffic Police Directorate, Costin Tatuc has more details: “There should be some more road-related improvements that should allow the separation of traffic sources, and I am referring to roads for slow vehicles that should be parallel to the national roads. The best solution to avoid localities is to build motorways.”



    In fact motorways are one of Romania’s weaknesses. 30 years after the 1989 anti-Communist uprising and after more than 12 years of EU membership, no highway was built to cross the Carpathians. At the end of 2018, Romania had almost 800 kms of motorways, of which some 100 kms from the time of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The few segments of highway that have been built so far connect Romania to its neighbors rather than allowing Romanians in the center of the country to get to Bucharest faster or to shorten the time spent driving to the Black Sea Coast. Besides the lack of interest of those in power, bureaucracy was another obstacle in the way of highway building, alongside the selection of contractors, including foreign ones, whose main aim was to make huge profits. (translation by L. Simion)

  • The European Court of Human Rights and the situation in Romanian prisons

    The European Court of Human Rights and the situation in Romanian prisons

    The bad news from Strasbourg comes to confirm a situation that everyone in the country has been well aware of. Detention conditions in Romanian penitentiaries run counter to the European Convention on Human Rights, being indicative of a structural dysfunction in the field. Therefore, general measures must be adopted by the state, the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, underlines. Romania has six months at its disposal to come up with a timetable and a package of measures to solve prison overcrowding and improper detention conditions.



    By this pilot decision issued on Tuesday, the court has fined Romania some 17,850 Euros and decided to postpone analysing in court similar complaints until Bucharest authorities come up with a set of measures they consider necessary. At the moment, official statistical figures point to a deficit of over 11,000 jobs and a degree of occupancy of over 200% in eight of the 44 Romanian penitentiaries. Some of the possible solutions include building new prisons or expanding the already existing detention space, pardoning detainees with short sentences and shortening the length of sentences in certain conditions or placing some detainees under home arrest.



    Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu has announced he has already analysed the ECHR ruling together with justice minister, Tudorel Toader, and has expressed confidence that the latter will draft the set of measures in due time. Pardoning or home arrest can only solve the issue of prison overcrowding on short term, says the director of the National Administration of Penitentiaries, Marius Vulpe, who suggests that new detention centres should be built: “In the long run, the only solution is to build new detention centres and refurbish the old ones. Sentences are granted based on these very grounds. Pardoning or home arrest do not solve the situation in penitentiaries. Resources should be invested to modernise prisons and increase accommodation capacity”.



    Former justice minister, Titus Corlatean, recently elected vice-president of the Council of Europe PA, has said the deadline set by ECHR is rather short: “It will not be easy at all, during this period of 6 months, to draft a coherent plan, which should become reality, which entails resources allocated to the project and a consistent decision making process at domestic level.”



    Experts say that no matter how expensive the measures to be adopted might seem, they will be a profitable investment, considering that in the past years alone, the Romanian state paid over 2 million Euros worth of damages to the detainees who won the cases they referred to ECHR against the Romanian state, deploring the improper conditions in penitentiaries.

  • Decisions in Bucharest Regarding Migration

    Decisions in Bucharest Regarding Migration

    News of thousands of refugees,
    mostly Syrian, transiting every day countries such as Macedonia and Serbia on
    their way to Western Europe make all the headlines these days and stay high on
    the European political agenda. Alongside Greece, Italy is one of the countries
    most exposed to the massive flow of immigrants, with over 104,000 people from
    Africa, the Middle East and South Asia reaching the Italian ports this year
    alone.

    After having tolerated for weeks the massive flows of such immigrants
    coming through Greece, last week the Skopje government accused the Greek
    authorities of deliberately guiding the immigrants towards Macedonia.
    Therefore, they declared a state of emergency and deployed police and army
    forces to the area, to put a stop to that massive inflow. Crossing the border
    was banned last Thursday for 24 hours, but later the immigrants were again
    allowed to pass.

    So far avoided by the waves of immigrants, Romania has decided
    to take some measures anyway. The more so as neighbouring Hungary is about to
    build a 4 metre high and 175 metre long fence on its border with Serbia, to
    prevent the immigrants from entering its territory. Following Thursday’s
    meeting of the National Committee for Special Emergency Situations, the
    security vice-premier, Gabriel Oprea, announced that Romania would tighten
    security on the border with Serbia. He explained that, although Europe was
    faced with an unprecedented migration crisis, which raised pressure in the
    southern and south-eastern parts of the EU, in Romania, the attempts to
    fraudulently cross the border and the number of asylum applications were still
    low, within last year’s parameters. However, some measures will be taken,
    focusing mainly on monitoring the situation in the region.


    Gabriel Oprea: We intend to intensify
    cooperation between the national authorities, in order to ensure safety and
    security on the national borders, to increase the operational capacity on the
    border with Serbia, and to boost the operational capacity in the areas at risk,
    by means of fixed and mobile equipment, used both during the day and at night.


    Gabriel Oprea also said that
    Bucharest was considering the development of an infrastructure that would
    enhance the accommodation capacity for immigrants, although Romania already has
    six regional accommodation centers, with a total capacity of some 1,500 places,
    which are only 20% occupied at the moment.

  • A new strategy for curbing school leaving

    A new strategy for curbing school leaving

    The Romanian Government on Wednesday adopted a strategy to reduce the number of young people who drop out of school after completing the secondary school cycle. AT EU level, Romania has one of the highest early dropout rates, 17.3% in 2013, placing Romania in 5th place after Italy, Portugal, Spain and Malta. The strategy is designed to gradually reduce the number of young people aged between 18 and 24 years who graduate eight grades and who dont opt for any further form of tuition of vocational training.



    According to the document, early school leaving is typical especially of vulnerable categories, such as young people in rural communities, children with underprivileged backgrounds, Rroma people and other ethnic nationals, as well as students who had to repeat a year or left school altogether. The authorities have warned that early school leaving has serious social and economic consequences. Young people who leave school are more prone to risks associated with unemployment and end up earning less money once they find a job. Estimates regarding the future skills of Europe show that only 1 in 10 jobs will be available to a person who leaves school early. The strategy has four sections and six representative programmes, including mechanisms, pre-emption, intervention and compensation measures.



    The Government wants to ensure access to schooling or vocational training to every child of up to 16 years of age, or until he or she graduates the 10th grade. Section one is focused on access to quality education for all children, by means of two programmes. The programmes are designed to increase access to the care and early education of children, expanding early education services to children under 3 years of age, and ensuring quality elementary and secondary education services.



    Section two is aimed at making sure that all children complete compulsory studies. This phase is focused on developing warning and early intervention systems to identify children who are more likely to leave school, as well as on developing pre-emption measures and solutions, including “The Afterschool School programme. Section three is aimed at reintegrating school dropouts into the national education system via “The Second Chance programme. And finally, the last section is aimed at developing proper institutional support by creating an environment conducive to the implementation, observation and assessment of the strategy.