September 24, 2015 UPDATE

A roundup of domestic and international news

România Internațional, 24.09.2015, 12:27

Romania’s
President Klaus Iohannis is on a visit to the US, until the 29th of September.
On Friday, he will attend the UN General Assembly in New York, where the 2030
Agenda for Sustainable Development is to be adopted. This is a commitment, by
heads of state and government, seen as historic, as it establishes a set of
universal objectives for a world in full process of transformation. In
Washington, Klaus Iohannis will have a meeting with the US vice-president Joe
Biden, with whom he will discuss means of strengthening the strategic
partnership between Romania and the US. At the invitation of the US President
Barak Obama, the Romanian head of state will also attend the summit on the
fight against the Islamic State terrorist organisation.

On
Thursday in London, the Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta presented before
the board of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)
several projects seen as priorities by the Romanian government, in fields such
as transportation, energy and public works, projects that will have a major
impact on regional development and on the national infrastructure. The EBRD
President Suma Chakrabarti has stated that Romania has a big potential, and the
bank is ready to support the country’s economic development, with a particular
focus on the development of the private sector. So far, the EBRD has invested
over seven billion Euros in Romania and has mobilized another 14 billion from
other funding sources. A new strategy for Romania, to cover the period until
2020, is to be approved by the EBRD board on September 30th.

Gathered in Brussels to attend an extraordinary informal
Council meeting, the EU heads of state and government committed themselves on
Wednesday night to grant an additional 1 billion Euro to the UN agencies that
support the refugees settled in the countries neighbouring Syria, namely
Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. The money will mainly go to the Office of the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees and to
the World Food Programme. Against the background of the current refugee crisis,
the worst since WWII, a decision was
made to strengthen the EU’s external borders. Also, the participants decided
that filtering centres set up in frontline members states such as Italy and Greece,
also known as ‘hot-spots’, will become operational starting late November. The
‘hotspot’ approach would facilitate the return of illegal migrants and help
relocate refugees to other EU member countries.

The European Committee for the Prevention of
Torture of the Council of Europe has called on Romania to combat any form of
maltreatment in prisons. In a report published on Thursday, the Committee
expressed worries over the many allegations of violence against prisoners. The
anti-torture committee, whose representatives paid several visits to Romania in
June 2014, received serious complaints from inmates held in high-security
prisons in Arad and Oradea, in western Romania, who said they had been
maltreated by the special forces. According to the report, overcrowding is
another issue in the Romanian penitentiary system. According to a report drawn
up by the Romanian Justice Ministry in 1990, Romania lost 139 cases at the European Court of Human
Rights because of the precarious conditions in the Romanian prisons. The
Romanian state had to pay 1.1 million Euros to those who complained and won in
court.

In a historic speech on Thursday,
the first by a Sovereign Pontiff before
the US Congress, Pope Francis made an appeal to vigilance against any type of
fundamentalism, be it religious or of any kind. He said that the fight against
extremism should not be carried out to the detriment of individual freedoms.
The Pope also said that the current migration crisis was the biggest since WWII
and called for many difficult decisions. He also made an appeal to the US
Congress, divided over the issue of immigration, to reject any hostile
mentality towards immigrants and added that the US should not repeat past
errors and mistakes.

At least 720 people of various
nationalities died and over 800 were wounded on Thursday in an ambush in Mina,
near the Holy City of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, during the annual pilgrimage
(Hajj), in which over 2 million people participate. This is the gravest tragedy
in the past 25 years recorded during the pilgrimage. In 1990, 1426 people died
crashed in a tunnel near the holy city.
The Mecca pilgrimage, the largest annual gathering in the world, has
been a stage for disasters before, including stampedes, fires and riots.

Romanian men’s tennis team will
be taking on the winner of the match pitting Lithuania against Slovenia, on
home turf, in the first round of the 2016 Davis Cup, according to the drawings
of lots in Santiago de Chile. Lithuania and Slovenia will be facing one another
sometime between the 30th of October and the 1st of
November, in Slovenia, in a playoff match counting towards maintaining a place
in Group 1. In another development, in Guangzhou, China, the Romanian tennis
player Simona Halep, ranking 2nd in the WTA classification, was
eliminated in the quarters by the Czech player Denisa Allertova, ranked 74th.
In the same round of the competition, WTA 49th -placed Monica
Niculescu was defeated by the Belgian Yanina Wickmayer.