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AMMAN — Former prime minister Marouf Bakhit is scheduled to deliver a lecture hosted by the United States Universities Graduates Club in Jordan on Saturday.

The lecture, titled “Jordan and the Regional Scene”, will be held at Al Hussein Cultural Centre at 6pm, according to the club, which includes former ministers, university presidents and Jordanian political and social personalities.

Founded this year, the club seeks to provide capacity building and guidance for young people who intend to further their education, according to a statement. It also works on enriching the expertise of its members through collaboration and networking, the statement said.

AMMAN — Irbid Governor Saad Shihab on Wednesday ordered the detention of a number of young men for loitering outside girls’ schools and chasing the students after classes.

Shihab said there will be no lenience when taking administrative measures against such acts that are not in line with Jordanians’ values.

The parents of the juveniles involved in these incidents signed bail bonds whereas the adults were suspended administratively, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, quoted Shihab as saying.

An official source at the Irbid Police Department said the department launched intensified campaigns on Tuesday, the first day of the academic year, to crack down on loiterers and “roadside Romeos”. 

Police arrested 13 juveniles and adults who were caught reportedly harassing girls leaving school after classes, the source said.

He urged school principals and parents to report any unusual gathering of men or boys around girls’ schools.

Earlier this year, the Jordan Teachers Association (JTA) urged the authorities to install surveillance cameras outside girls’ schools to address the issue of “roadside Romeos”.

As part of its lobbying campaign to push the Ministry of Education to take action in this regard, the syndicate carried out an online opinion poll on whether surveillance cameras would prevent young men from loitering near girls’ schools.

JTA said 68.8 per cent of respondents believed such a move would be effective in addressing flirting and harassment. 

AMMAN — Jordan has the second largest number of refugees per capita, according to an international report.

The report by Statista, a Germany-based statistics portal, said Jordan ranked after Lebanon, with the ratio of refugees standing at 87 per 1,000 per capita.

According to official figures, there are some 1.4 million Syrians in Jordan.

In Lebanon, there are an estimated 1.15 million refugees, equating to 232 per 1,000 inhabitants, the report said.

“Jordan came after Lebanon as the population of Lebanon is smaller and this is relative. If the other non-Syrian refugees in Jordan are taken into account the ratio will be higher in Jordan,” Musa Shteiwi, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, told The Jordan Times Wednesday.

The number of people who live in Jordan currently is estimated at around 10 million, around 6.6 million are Jordanians while the rest from various nationalities, according to official data. Lebanon’s population is estimated at over 4 million, according to web sources.

Refugees from 44 nations, including Somalis, Iraqis and Sudanese, reside in Jordan, according to the UNHCR.  

The influx of refugees from many nations is a testimony to Jordan’s safety and security, Shteiwi said.

“The fact that Jordan has a large number of refugees shows that Jordanians are very hospitable, tolerant and welcoming to people from other races, ethnicities and backgrounds, which is a reason why all those people seek refuge in the Kingdom,” he added.

“At the same time, the presence of large numbers of refugees causes a burden on the economy and many sectors including health, education and energy,” Shteiwi said, adding that the situation makes it necessary to increase aid to Jordan.

By the end of 2014, 59.5 million people were forcibly displaced, compared to 51.2 million a year earlier, the Statista report said. 

Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees with 1.59 million, due to the conflict in neighbouring Syria. 

The report by Statista showed that the ratio of refugees per 1,000 per capita in Chad reached 34, in Djibouti 23, in South Sudan 21, in Turkey 21, 19 in Mauritania and 15 in Sweden. 

AMMAN — The Cabinet on Wednesday endorsed amendments to the Officers’ Service Law of the Jordan Armed Forces-Arab Army.

The changes are in line with constitutional amendments that stipulate that the power of appointing the army chief and the director of the General Intelligence Department is vested in the King.

The Council of Ministers also approved the registration of a company with limited liability that is fully owned by a Kuwaiti businessman to invest in the real estate sector at an investment volume reaching JD100 million.

The council also approved the overall framework of a strategy to address the impact of the closure of Syrian and Iraqi borders on the country’s agricultural exports.

Moreover, the Cabinet ratified the envisaged strategic plan for the Ministry of Municipal Affairs for 2015-2020 and the strategy on managing municipalities’ solid waste. 

NORTHERN GHOR — A total of 4,000 tourists visited Islamic shrines in the Northern Ghor in August, Abed Smeirat, director of the district’s awqaf department said Wednesday.

Smeirat said hundreds of tourists came from Arab and Muslim countries.

The shrines house the tombs of Prophet Mohammad’s companions Muath Bin Jabal, Sharhabeel Bin Hasna and Amer Bin Abi Waqqas. 

AMMAN —Tourism Minister Nayef Al Fayez on Wednesday met with head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, Archimandrite Alexander.

Fayez said the ministry is looking forward to expanding tourism cooperation with Russia and increasing the number of Russian tourists to the Kingdom.

He stressed the need to attract more Russian tourist groups to Jordan, mainly to the Baptism Site.

The archimandrite praised the strong bilateral ties as well as the role of His Majesty King Abdullah in enhancing these relations and safeguarding Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem.

AMMAN — Women’s groups on Tuesday said they had hoped the 2015 draft elections law would have included a 20 per cent quota for women.

On Monday, Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour unveiled the new draft bill that reduced the number of Lower House members to 130 from 150 under the 2015 elections bill, which is based on the open proportional list at the district level.

The new bill kept the 15-seat quota for women from the previous law (around 11 per cent).

“This was below our expectations because we were hoping that the government would increase the quota to 20 per cent [26 seats out of 130] since it pledged in October 2013 to adopt our strategy, which clearly stated that factor by the year 2017,” said Salma Nims, secretary general of the Jordanian National Commission for Women.

Nims told The Jordan Times that another concern was that there is no mention of the compulsory presence of women’s names in the multi-member district list.

“There should be a certain strategy whereby women would be guaranteed seats on the multi-member district list,” Nims stressed.

She said the women’s movement and civil society will lobby deputies and the Lower House Legal Committee to ensure that a “certain mechanism is enforced to safeguard women’s rights in these lists.”

Director of the Jordan Women’s Union Nadia Shamroukh echoed Nims’ concerns.

“We did submit several proposals demanding that women in the multi-member district list would be placed in the number two slots,” Shamroukh told The Jordan Times.

Jerash Deputy Wafaa Bani Mustafa, who won outside the quota in the last elections, said she was also hopeful that women’s representation in the Lower House would be at least 30 per cent.

However, Bani Mustafa told The Jordan Times that “it was a positive move from the government to keep the 15-seat quota for women although it reduced the total number of seats to 130.”

“I believe this was a good step on the government’s side and hopefully by eliminating the one-person, one-vote system, more women will be encouraged to run now that they might have a better chance with the multi-member district list,” the MP said. 

The new draft bill completely abolishes the decades-long one-person, one-vote system. The new law is based on the at-large voting system in which all candidates can run for parliamentary elections on one large multi-member ticket.

Under Article 9 of the 68-article law, eligible voters will have a number of votes equal to the number of seats allocated for their district in the Lower House.

Each eligible voter has to vote for a multi-member list as a whole and for individual candidates within the same ticket.

Under the 2012 law, on the basis of which the 2013 parliamentary elections were held, each voter was given two votes: one for a candidate at the district level and another for a closed proportional list that competed for 27 seats at the national level.

The women’s quota was introduced in 2003 “as a means to improve women’s political representation in society”.

Before that, only two women had ever served in the Lower House: Toujan Faisal, who won a Circassian seat in the 1993 elections, and Nuha Maaytah, who won a seat through internal parliamentary elections in 2001.

Seven women were elected to the Lower House in 2007, including six via the quota system, while the seventh, Madaba Deputy Falak Jamaani, became the first woman to win a seat through direct competition after the quota was introduced.

The quota was doubled before the 2010 elections, resulting in 13 women MPs in the 16th Parliament, including one deputy, Reem Badran, who won through direct competition in Amman’s 3rd District.

The 2012 Elections Law increased the number of Lower House seats allocated for women to 15, guaranteeing that women would have a representative in each of the Kingdom’s 12 governorates and the three badia districts.

Currently, 18 women are members of the 150-seat Lower House, with 15 having won through a quota system, two via national lists and one by direct election.

AMMAN — One Syrian infiltrator was killed and another critically injured after they were spotted attempting to cross from Syria into Jordan on Tuesday morning, according to an official source from the Jordan Armed Forces-Arab Army.  

Border guards immediately dealt with the situation in accordance with the rules of engagement as soon as they detected the infiltrators, the army official source pointed out. 

As a result, one was killed and another was critically injured, according to the army official, who did not give any further details.

Over the past months, border surveillance troops have detected, and arrested or killed a number of infiltrators, mostly narcotics smugglers and suspected terrorists.

The army has repeatedly stressed that it would deal with any attempts that could bring harm to Jordan with the necessary force.

AMMAN — Public expenditure on the Irbid Governorate development programme between 2016 and 2018 is expected to stand at around JD323.664 million, Planning and International Cooperation Minister Imad Fakhoury said Tuesday.

At a meeting with representatives of various sectors in the governorate, some 80km north of Amman, Fakhoury said the estimated cost of development projects for 2016 is JD89.243 million, while it stands at JD114.422 million for 2017, and JD120 million for 2018, according to a ministry statement.

Stressing that the development programme should take the challenges facing the governorate into consideration, the minister said these problems include having two poverty pockets in the governorate — Southern Shuneh and Ramtha — in addition to having a high rate of unemployment which stands at 13.2 per cent in Irbid compared with 11.9 per cent nationwide.

Irbid, which has a population of around 1.188 million according to the Department of Statistics’ 2014 estimates, also has a poverty rate of 15 per cent, compared with 14.4 nationwide. 

As a northern governorate affected by the Syrian refugee influx, Fakhoury said around $33.739 million in funds has been approved in the Jordan Response Plan for projects in Irbid, adding the ministry is still contacting the international community to urge donors to contribute further to alleviate the refugee burden.

The minister said the selection of development projects ready for implementation will be based on the priority list created as part of the 2016-2018 Irbid Governorate development programme after a previous visit from the Planning and International Cooperation Ministry team.

To benefit from investment opportunities in Irbid, according to the investment map for the northern governorates, he said the government will cooperate with funds and microfinance institutions to direct their funding towards these potential investments.

The ministry will also work with the Jordan Investment Commission to promote these opportunities and attract investors, Fakhoury said, highlighting plans to raise young people’s awareness of microfinance institutions and means to obtain funding from them.

The Irbid meeting — which brought together a local team representing various sectors of the governorate, including its municipal councils, civil society institutions, the private sector, and women and youth movements — was part of a series of planned gatherings to discuss the draft for upgrading governorate development programmes for the years 2016-2018.

Speaking at the gathering, Irbid Governor Saad Shihab said residents of Irbid are optimistic that this development programme will meet their needs and address urgent requirements in various sectors, which have been recorded and listed after meetings with the local community.

Shihab voiced hope that the programme will provide strategic plans to secure residents’ water needs, address traffic congestion in Irbid city and overhaul public transport services in the governorate.

AMMAN — Educators and media professionals are required to pass an Arabic proficiency exam similar to the TOEFL in order to qualify for jobs in their respective sectors under a law that went into effect on Tuesday.

Under Article 10 of the law to protect Arabic the proficiency exam will be offered at accredited centres that issue the certificates required to be submitted when applying to positions in media — such as broadcasters, producers and editors — or education and higher education, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported.

Non-Arab teachers and educators who teach a foreign language are not required to take the exam, nor are those who work at media outlets’ foreign language departments, under the law, published in the Official Gazette 60 days ago, according to Jordan Academy of Arabic President Khalid Karaki.

Karaki said the new law was issued simultaneously with the Jordan Academy for Arabic Law for 2015, according to Petra. 

The former minister and Royal Court chief said launching the law came to counter the growing use of colloquial Arabic in the media, and even in lectures and seminars. 

Language and grammatical errors also abound in a number of places, streets, public facilities and shop names, he said.

Streets are full of “linguistic contamination” and texts that do not adhere to language rules, Karaki added.

The law, he said, is reform oriented and is “one of the greatest gifts offered to the community” because it is part of the overall comprehensive reform project, Petra reported.

Under the law, a committee will be formed to review the names of streets, neighbourhoods and public yards, as well as commercial, financial, industrial, science, social, service, entertainment, and tourism institutions.

Moreover, ministries; official, public, and private institutions; municipalities; syndicates; organisations; clubs, political parties; civil society institutions; and companies, are all obligated to use modern standard Arabic in their documents, transactions, records and clearances. 

Karaki, a former deputy prime minister, noted that standard Arabic should be used in public advertisements and movie subtitles, and on banknotes and coins. It should also be the main language of scientific research. 

Scientific research could be published in foreign languages provided that an Arabic translation is provided, he said, and teachers in schools and higher education institutes will be obligated to use proper Arabic in class, according to Petra.