(source: SME.sk / Hej,ty)
Good evening. Welcome to the Wednesday, March 30, 2022 edition of Today in Slovakia, which brings the main news of the day in less than five minutes.
Vote on crucial judicial reform postponed
Justice Minister Mária Kolíková still struggling to find support for her draft map of courts. (source: TASR)
The parliament will not vote on the court map at the current parliamentary session. MPs postponed the vote on the proposal as well as the Construction Act to the next session, which begins on April 26.
A vote on the map of courts, as proposed by the Justice Ministry, is the last milestone to pass to ask, for the first time, for money from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility.
The MPs postponed the vote based on the proposal of the coalition parties. Head of the caucus of the Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO), Michal Šipoš, said that until the court map reform has the support of the entire coalition and all MPs, it is better to postpone the vote.
He did not want to comment on the details of changes, which are still being negotiated, nor did he want to specify the problematic parts of the reform.
The Government’s Office department responsible for the recovery plan believes that it will be possible to send the first request for the payment by the end of April 2022, despite the postponement in the vote.
“If the missing reform of the court map will be passed at the beginning of the upcoming parliamentary session, we will manage to request [money] by the end of April,” Barbora Belovická from the department told The Slovak Spectator.
Russian Embassy’s staff will be reduced
Russian Embassy in Bratislava (source: Sme)
As many as 35 Russian diplomats will have to leave Slovakia, following a decision of the Slovak Foreign Affairs Ministry on the reduction of the embassy’s staff.
Russian Ambassador to Slovakia Igor Bratchikov has already received a diplomatic note about this decision.
He was summoned to the ministry following information by Slovakia’s security forces about the actions of another Russian diplomat at odds with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
Earlier this month, three Russian diplomats were expelled due to the espionage scandal investigated by the police.
With the reduction of the staff members, the maximum number of diplomatic and service passports holders who are part of the Russian diplomatic mission will also be set, according to the ministry.
“In this regard, we must regretfully say that after the previous expulsions of Russian diplomats in the past two years, the Russian diplomatic mission has not shown interest in proper work on our territory,” the Slovak Foreign Affairs Ministry said, as quoted by the TASR newswire.
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Refugees from Ukraine
Altogether 2,934 people crossed the Slovak-Ukrainian border on March 29; 1,252 persons applied for temporary protection. The total number of people who have arrived in Slovakia from Ukraine has so far amounted to 286,324; 57,136 applied for temporary protection and 167 for asylum.
A series of information seminars for people from Ukraine will take place tomorrow (March 31, 2022) from 16:00 in the Primate’s Palace in Bratislava, organised by the Mareena organisation. Participants will find more information about first-contact services offered by the city of Bratislava, where to find information and counselling, which cultural institutions they can visit with children, or where to seek Slovak language courses. Find more information here.
The cabinet approved the contribution to the accommodation for people fleeing Ukraine at its March 30 session; it will be provided by the end of June. Hotels and guest houses will be entitled to ask for €7.70 per person per night, ordinary people can apply for €7 per person per night. In the case of children younger than 15 years of age, they will be entitled to half the sum.
Quote of the day
“It is a sign of a great trust to send someone’s troops to another country to defend the Alliance’s and the country’s territory.”
Slovak Foreign Affairs Minister Ivan Korčok after meeting his Dutch counterpart Wopke Hoekstra in Bratislava. He thanked Hoekstra for his country sending troops and the Patriot air defence system to Slovakia. The two also discussed mutual relations in various fields and the situation in Ukraine.
Slovak Foreign Affairs Minister Ivan Korčok welcomed his Dutch counterpart Wopke Hoekstra in Bratislava. (source: TASR)
Picture of the day
Nearly 3,000 people live in the village of Topoľčianky, but none have had quite the same impact as one of its temporary guests. It is best-known for its majestic manor house which, in the 1920s, became the summer retreat of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic. The village retains the charms that led him here in the first place, including 400 years of history before Masaryk arrived.
Listen to our podcast
Ecotourism trips provide visitors to the Eastern Carpathians with a wilderness experience while contributing to the protection of local nature. The concept of ecotourism has yet to really take off in Slovakia, but some projects can be found around the country.
The Aevis Foundation works to restore the European wilderness – which has long been disappearing in the Eastern Carpathians - in Slovakia, Ukraine, and Poland. The foundation is hoping that the Vlčie Hory area will receive greater environmental protection.
“We have many problems in each of these countries, though,” Aevis’s Tomáš Vida admits.
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In other news
More than 30 percent of people in Slovakia believe the war in Ukraine was deliberately provoked by the West, and Russia merely responded to this provocation; and 22 percent trusts in the pro-Kremlin narratives that are apologising for and defending the involvement of Russian troops in Ukraine, while this trust depends on the content of a respective claim. This stems from a recent poll carried out in late March by the Institute of Experimental Psychology of the Centre of Social and Psychological Sciences, part of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
6,790 people were newly diagnosed as Covid positive out of 14,738 PCR tests performed on March 29. The number of people in hospitals is 2,161; and 23 more deaths were reported on Tuesday. The vaccination rate is at 51.27 percent; and 2,819,721 people have received the first dose of the vaccine. More stats on Covid-19 in Slovakia here.
About 35 people on average currently die of Covid, and more than 50 percent of PCR tests carried out daily are positive, according to analysts working at the Health Ministry. Only 30 percent of people have been vaccinated with the booster. As for the current valid measures, Health Minister Vladimír Lengvarský (OĽaNO) said they may discuss the relaxation of measures concerning masks and duties linked to the registration in the eHranica form in the coming weeks.
The National Criminal Agency (NAKA) has detained 24 persons within its Pompeje (Pompeii) operation. This concerns public purchases conducted by the Administration of State Material Reserves in the years 2016-2020; the police are investigating the machinations in public procurement and the violation of duties when administering someone else’s property.
The Slovak and Czech police have detained in Prague Štefan Agh, an accomplice of mobster Marian Kočner, whose 13-year prison sentence for forging promissory notes for private broadcaster TV Markíza has been recently confirmed. He was discovered in a rather peculiar way: based on pictures and videos from “a perceptive citizen” who spotted him on the train, the police reported on Facebook. The Czech authorities will now be deciding on his extradition.
Inflation could reach 9.7-13.8 percent on average next year, depending on how the conflict in Ukraine develops, according to the National Bank of Slovakia (NBS), the country’s central bank. Originally, it was supposed to amount to slightly more than 2 percent. In its recent quarterly prognosis, the NBS also revised its prognosis for this year’s inflation to 7.6 percent (up from the originally expected 5.5 percent). The economy should grow in the coming three years by 2-3 percent, while originally the bank expected it to rise at more than 5 percent both in 2022 and 2023.
Bratislava will host tomorrow an informal meeting of the foreign affairs minister for the so-called Bucharest Nine, i.e. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia and Slovakia. They will discuss the reinforcement of NATO’s eastern flank and the war in Ukraine.
Slovakia’s activities in the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, will be suspended due to Russian aggression towards Ukraine, the cabinet has decided.
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