The administration is ready to issue birth, marriage and death certificates with recorded ethnicity

registry office for keeping registry books (4)
Free press. / Dragan Mitreski

The ethnic affiliation of the citizens will be entered in every newly issued extract from the registers of births, marriages and deaths, in order to prevent abuse during employment in the public administration, the Minister of Justice Krenar Loga announced these days. Today on the website of the Ministry of Justice, it is expected that the new instructions will be published according to which the extracts from the registers will be issued from now on. The Registry Office says that as soon as the new guidelines are published in the Official Gazette, they will start applying them.

– The instructions contain all the details of how the extracts from the registers will be issued from now on. There will be no fiscal implications from the new guidelines, there are no additional costs for us - the director of the Registry Office, Emir Suleimani, told "Sloboden Pechat" briefly.

Minister Loga previously announced that with this amendment it will be possible to prove ethnicity with an official document.

– For any possible abuse of ethnicity, criminal procedures for false reporting can be opened. The parties in the employment procedure can also file a complaint, but also a lawsuit for abuse, in case the institution avoids official documents - announced Loga.

For more than two years, the parties of the Albanians have been demanding that some kind of change be made in the system in order to prevent abuses when citizens choose by declaration which ethnic community they belong to in order to be employed in a position in the public administration which, according to the balancer, should be filled with a member of a certain ethnic community, in order to achieve fair ethnic representation in the institutions. Thus, over the years, the media repeatedly wrote that Macedonians declare themselves as Albanians, Turks, Roma, Serbs, etc., in order to "enter" the workplace, as well as other combinations of "choosing affiliation" according to the needs of the competition. There were such examples in a number of institutions, in the State Commission for the Prevention of Corruption, and the last observed case was a few weeks ago in the Municipality of Kumanovo, where during employment several people declared themselves as Albanians, because the competition required people of Albanian nationality.

The Minister of Information Society and Administration Azir Aliu then assessed that this abuse is not common.

- Maybe you have the name of someone who declared himself Albanian, but is of another nationality or vice versa, but I want to believe that such abuses are less than 0,5 percent of employment in the administration. But regardless of the personal name, the feeling is something else. At the end of the day, someone may say my name is like this, but I feel like this. We have no right either by law or by the Constitution to ignore that - said Minister Aliu.

He then added that the abuses are on an individual and not an institutional level, and every citizen has the right according to the Constitution to feel different every day.

According to the law on keeping civil records, data about the birth of the child, ie name and surname, sex of the child, as well as the day and time of birth, but not his nationality, are recorded in the civil registry of births. More information is recorded for the parents, such as first and last name, day, month, year and place of birth, nationality, citizenship, residence and apartment address. Recognition of paternity, determination of paternity or motherhood, adoption, guardianship, etc. are also recorded.

According to the previous instructions, the ethnicity of neither the person to whom the certificate refers nor the parents is recorded in the birth certificate.

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