| NON-EUROPEAN TRENDS IN THE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA (12.10.07) |
| (2007-10-12) |
| Last updated: 2007-10-17 10:44 EET |
The first to benefit from these new provisions are students, journalists and business people who have seen visa application procedures largely simplified. There are, however, Moldovan citizens for whom access in the Union is even simpler, as they hold both a Romanian citizenship and a European citizenship. As a minimum moral repair, the Romanian legislation allows for persons who have lost their Romanian citizenship when Eastern Romanian territories were annexed by the Soviets, to recover it.
But Romanian foreign minister Adrian Cioroianu has mentioned that there is no risk for the Union to be flooded with Moldovans. According to him, only 98 000 citizenships have been granted until now, which is a rather modest figure if we compare it with the hundreds of thousands of applications that have been filed. His statements would not have been necessary, had the Communist regime in Kishinev failed to complain before Western chancelleries that Romania was too liberal in this respect. The frustration of Vladimir Voronin’s authoritarian regime is that, although it rules with an iron fist, its citizens basically always manage to slip through the net.
Consequently, as a meagre punitive measure, Communists have just adopted a law whereby they ban persons with a double citizenship from holding any state and administration position, with the gamut running from the government to parliament, and from police to customs officers. What the Kishinev media was keen to emphasize is that, before the law was passed, president Voronin, former high-level member of the Communist party and a former officer with the Soviet army, gave up one of his citizenships. The Russian one, it goes without saying.
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2025-04-03
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