Meeting here on Tuesday, Bulgaria's National Assembly Defence Committee voted, 10-0 with 3 abstentions, to support a Government-proposed bill to ratify a Memorandum of Understanding between Bulgaria's Ministry of Defence and Romania's Ministry of National Defence regarding the setting up of a Regional Special Operations Component Command Headquarters (HQR-SOCC). According to https://www.bta.bg/, the two countries signed the Memorandum during the NATO Summit in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2024. "The Regional Headquarters can go into operation as early as the beginning of 2025," caretaker Defence Minister Atanas Zapryanov said then. The initiative is part of the evolution of NATO's command and control system and will rotate between the two countries once every two years. Zapryanov said that this joint command is very important for both peacetime and wartime.Under the Memorandum, the headquarters will be a temporary deployable command element and will be activated according to the two countries' national procedures and in accordance with the established mechanisms of the Alliance for participation in Allied operations or upon activation of NATO's defence plans, as well as for participation in bilateral and multilateral exercises and training events, the reasons to the bill says. After the HQR-SOCC reaches Full Operational Capability, each of the countries will act as a Lead Nation, hosting the command for one year (or up to two years, if necessitated by circumstances) until rotation to the new Lead Nation which reaches Full Operational Capability. Romania will be the first to assume the command of HQR-SOCC. The Regional Special Operations Component Command Headquarters will be capable of commanding and controlling multinational special operations forces (SOF) and NATO operations support and conduct forces, the cited source says.
Participation in cultural education activities continues to be limited, with the main barriers being difficult access, insufficient knowledge, and cost, the recently released Cultural Consumption Barometer 2024 shows. The report showed that many Romanians still associate culture with entertainment rather than with personal development or furthering their knowledge. The need for relaxation dominates in cultural […]
Roughly 84% of Romanians say that the pace of the state’s digitalization is slow or very slow, according to an Edge Institute & AtlasIntel study presented at the Digital Governance Summit 2025, which took place on Tuesday, November 25, at the presidential palace in Bucharest. The survey aims to capture the way citizens relate to […]
Romania’s Superior Council of Magistracy (CSM) issued a negative opinion on the new bill regarding magistrates’ pensions. The move is only the latest development concerning a heated issue that led to tensions between the executive and the judiciary branch. CSM’s opinion is consultative, and the government led by Ilie Bolojan can still take responsibility for […]
Romania took the presidency of the Central European Initiative (or CEI) on Wednesday, November 26, according to a press release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE). The organization is a regional intergovernmental forum established in 1989, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. It gathers 17 Member States in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe […]
Trade between Romania and Poland continues to grow, with annual bilateral exchanges in goods now valued at more than EUR 12 billion, according to figures presented by the Polish-Romanian Bilateral Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PRBCC). The data was released during a reception in Bucharest marking Poland’s Independence Day and Romania’s National Day. Polish investments […]
As Romania moves closer to implementing the EU Pay Transparency Directive, local employers are preparing for one of the most consequential shifts in workplace regulation in over a decade. The directive, set for transposition by June 2026, introduces strict new rules on salary disclosure, pay reporting, and equal-pay verification, aiming to close persistent gender gaps […]
