The consular offices of Romania in the Republic of Moldova are being supplemented with personnel and they will step up efforts so as to faster deal with citizens’ applications. “For the purpose, organizational and logistic measures have been planned,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania stated in a response to a public petition initiated by the Moldova legal consulting firm JustConsult, IPN reports, quoting the company.

In its response, the Ministry said that to reduce the number of unprocessed applications, the personnel of the Consular Section in Chisinau was supplemented with specialists of the Consular Department. The procedure for issuing the consent of the diplomatic mission’s head to those who want to take an oath of allegiance at the National Citizenship Authority was modified and the issuing process was accelerated now that this is not conditional upon the number of places made available by the Authority. These and other measures already led to the diminution of the number of applications under pre-validation.

There is no legal possibility of staging the oath taking ceremony in other places than the embassy or the consular offices. Also, the Ministry cannot deal with the request to allow taking the oath at the local offices of the National Citizenship Authority in Iași, Galați or Suceava as this is within the remit of the Authority.

JustConsult sent the public petition asking the Romanian authorities to ensure the Moldovan citizens’ access in a normal regime to consular services on January 3. The petition was signed by 3,728 persons. The significant delay in the periods for scheduling appointment for consular services to regain the Romanian nationality or to obtain documents is the main dissatisfaction of the petitioners. Currently, several tens of thousands of people who regained the Romanian nationally by order of the National Citizenship Authority have to wait for over a year to schedule an appointment to take the oath of allegiance.