Macedonia said on Monday it filed a complaint against Greece with an international court after Athens blocked its bid to join NATO because of an ongoing name dispute.
Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki said Macedonia had lodged the complaint at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, the Netherlands. It was not immediately clear when the court would hear the case.
Greece wants Macedonia to change its name, arguing that it implies a territorial claim against its own region of Macedonia.
Negotiations between the two countries are deadlocked at the UN. Milososki said Macedonia remains committed to participation in the talks.
Greece blocked Macedonia’s bid to join NATO during an alliance summit in April, when Balkan states Albania and Croatia were invited to join.
Milososki said Greece had violated a 1995 interim accord aimed at improving relations between Greece and the former Yugoslav republic and working toward resolving the name dispute.
“Macedonia has submitted a complaint to ICJ for one reason alone: to protect its rights incorporated into the Interim Accord,” he said.
The court confirmed late on Monday that Macedonia had filed the case but gave no detail on when it would be heard.
In a statement, the court said Macedonia asked it to order Greece “to cease and desist from objecting in any way” to Macedonia joining NATO or any other international organization.
Greek Foreign Ministry spokesman Giorgos Koumoutsakos said Athens would present its case at The Hague with “confidence and determination.”
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS