The law on the citizenship of the Republic of Moldova will be toughened up. According to the director of the Public Services Agency (PSA) Mircea Eșanu, the new amendments will be submitted to the Cabinet by the end of May. He noted that the law could be modified to stipulate the obligation to know Romanian for those who want to obtain the citizenship of the Republic of Moldova, IPN reports.
The PSA director said that Romania is also working on tightening the procedures for obtaining the citizenship and the Moldovan authorities are working closely with the Romanian ones. “In Romania, there are conducting an exercise to amend the law. They are tightening extremely seriously, according to the European requirements. We are also working on the new law. I’m sure that by the end of May, we will submit to the Cabinet a new citizenship law, which will be stricter, tougher. Due to our much more frequent exchanges of information with the National Citizenship Authority, we also managed to discover the schemes that were applied in our country,” Mircea Eșanu stated in the talk show “Black Box Plus” on TV8 channel.
The official didn’t rule out the possibility that the obligation to know the Romanian language will be introduced, noting that it is the legislator’s option. “That’s what the Romanian side opts for. I realize that this will be a complicated matter for those who have lived a life and were born in the Russian Federation. But in the current regional circumstances, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad decision to toughen up the law,” said the PSA director.
Mircea Eșanu Esanu stressed that the number of refusals to grant citizenship has increased. In 2022, the applications of 65 people were rejected, while in the first months of this year 67 refusals have been recorded. Half are with incomplete files. Those that contain falsified documents are passed on to the National Anticorruption Center.
He assured that all the applications are thoroughly examined, including those submitted in the past, in order to identify any fraudulent scheme and be able to withdraw the citizenship accordingly. “The procedure for obtaining citizenship is quite complex and one needs to prove with supporting documents the Moldovan origins. As now they understood very well the duties of a person from the PSA who receives the file or issues a certificate extracted from civil status documents, I hope we will have files sent to court,” said Mircea Eșanu.
