The Statistical Office is also awaiting a final agreement to postpone the census. From there they say that they do not want to comment on the agreement of the two party leaders of SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE, Zoran Zaev and Hristijan Mickoski to postpone the census until the whole process in Parliament is completed.

The Director of Statistics, Apostol Simovski says that in the interest of the census process of Macedonian citizens, he will not give statements to the media.

- We should see the proposal in action, says Simovski.

According to the Minister of Justice Bojan Maricic, the amendments to the Draft Law on Census have already been discussed at a meeting with the Director Apostol Simovski and his Deputy Ilmi Selami.

- The changes come down to two questions, that is the date of the census which is in one provision, instead of April 1 to 21 it will be written from September 5 to 30 and in the part that the diaspora can continue to be counted from March 1 when it started, by September 30th, when the field part of the census should be completed, Maricic said.

The procedure is as follows - after the Government adopts it at a session, the Census Draft-Law will be submitted to the Parliament.

- Since these are not substantial changes, I expect the Assembly to adopt it quickly. Due to the urgency of the moment before the start of the census, the new draft law on the census, just like the previous one, will have a European flag and in a shortened procedure. This way we will be able to achieve what was agreed at the meeting yesterday. In that procedure, it is not possible to block by submitting thousands of amendments, Maricic said.

In Slovakia, 12 Roma communities are currently quarantined in connection with the coronavirus pandemic. This was confirmed by Andrea Bučková, the representative of the Government of the Slovak Republic for the Roma community. The ombudsman Maria Pataky does not like that.

"The current numbers of quarantined communities indicate that we are still struggling with the approach of introducing area-based community quarantines," Bučková said.

The Office is based on data from regular monitoring carried out at the level of selected municipalities. "As of March 23, 2021, the Office of the Government Plenipotentiary registers, on the basis of this monitoring, a total of 45 places / municipalities where either the entire Roma settlement or part of the community has been quarantined since December 2020," she specified.

The closure of marginalized Roma communities due to quarantine has recently been criticized by Ombudsman Marie Patakyová. At the same time, she asked Prosecutor General Maroš Žilink to review the legality of decrees of regional public health authorities (RÚVZ) in this matter and, if necessary, to turn to the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic.

According to her, ordering such quarantine is selective and so far only applies to areas with marginalized communities. At that time, the Public Health Office of the Slovak Republic reacted that regional authorities do not approach the closure of sites automatically.

Link: http://www.romea.cz/cz/zpravodajstvi/zahranicni/slovensko-v-souvislosti-s-pandemii-koronaviru-je-v-karantene-12-romskych-komunit.ombudsmance-se-to-nelibi