Working groups for education on behalf of Chisinau, Tiraspol hold meeting in Bender

Chisinau, 11 October /MOLDPRES/ - An ordinary meeting of the working groups for education, with participation of representatives within the five-plus-two format of talks, was held at the Bender-based OSCE Mission’s headquarters. The delegation on behalf of Chisinau was led by the acting coordinator of the working group, Valentin Crudu, the Reintegration Policies Bureau has reported. 

The participants in the meeting discussed a wide range of issues on the work of the eight Latin-script schools from the Transnistrian region, which are subordinated to Moldova’s Education, Culture and Research Ministry.   

Chisinau’s representatives demanded resumption of the discussions on ensuring needed conditions for a good work of the Moldovan schools from the Transnistrian region. They demanded, as a first step, providing the Evrica theoretical lyceum from Ribnita with headquarters, by returning the building constructed for this school with Moldova’s state budget money, which was blocked by the Tiraspol structures following the schools’ crisis of 2004. Contrary to the agreements on identifying a solution to this problem, reached at the previous meetings of the working group for education, Tiraspol’s representatives avoided discussing the subject, noting that the issues was within the competence of the political representatives in the process of negotiations for the Transnistrian settlement.   

No progress was made on the topic on apostillizing the education documents issued in the Transnistrian region either. The Tiraspol representatives replaced the concrete discussions on the model of the education act, due to be subject to apostillizing, by formulating irrelevant proposals in this case, having connections with other legal mechanisms.     

The participants in the meeting tackled also other issues, such as the conditions for concluding contracts on lease and assuming by the lessor of a part of the spending for the maintenance and capital repair of buildings, setting fair tariffs for public utilities, results of the common assessment of the sanitary state of the Latin-script schools from the Transnistrian region, etc.   

The sides agreed that the discussions on these and other topical subjects would continue at the next meeting, with the date due to be established in working regime.