VILNIUS — The Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs said the Eastern Partnership program (EaP), which aims to bring Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine closer to the EU, would strengthen the bloc and also increase living standards in these countries.
“Over the years, the EU has substantially strengthened relations with its Eastern neighbors and has supported reform efforts. The progress is visible, but the process is not yet finished,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Vygaudas Ušackas said at a conference on EaP in Vilnius today.
“The Eastern Partnership is a significant step forward — it finally gives us a strategy toward the east,” he said.
Following yesterday’s visit of the Belarusian head of state Alexander Lukashenko to Vilnius, Ušackas said Belarus would be welcomed into the EaP project, but echoed Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius’ statements that that would require respect for human rights and rule of law.
Ušackas referred to the fall out of the Balkan conflicts in the 90s as an example of why the EU should look after border countries, having spent so much money on rebuilding the region.
The EaP is meant to complement the Northern Dimension and the Union for the Mediterranean by providing an institutionalized forum for discussing visa agreements, free trade deals and strategic partnership agreements with the EU’s eastern neighbors while avoiding the controversial topic of accession to the European Union.
Visa liberalization was a key theme in the first half of today’s conference with members emphasizing connections between people as important for development of the countries.
“Joining the EU is something supported by 70 percent of our population and all of our political parties. We are looking this as a tool to help us move toward European standards,” Tatiana Molcean, Moldova’s Charge d’affaires to Sweden, said.
Georgian parliamentarian Giorgi Kandelaki said that people in Georgia have a harder time getting visas to the EU than those who had illegally obtained Russian passports, adding that the first biometric passports, which would allow visa free travel, would be produced by the end of the year.
The EaP aims to ease visa restrictions on people from the six countries in various ways including the introduction of free visas in both directions.
One Europe
Lithuania’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Evaldas Ignatavičius said the EaP would help citizens and politicians of the EU see these third countries as part of Europe, not as outsiders.
“Often Europe speaks of these countries as part of another world, but I think this [EaP] will help them to think of them as on the same continent and the same place,” he said.
The EaP was created jointly Sweden and Poland in 2008 and then taken up for implementation this year to coincide with Sweden’s rotating presidency of the EU.
“For Sweden this partnership is a priority of our presidency of the EU. In 2008, Sweden and Poland presented its plans for the Eastern neighborhood policy – so far so good, but the main task now is implementation,” Swedish Ambassador to Lithuania Ulrika Cronenberg-Mossberg said.
Cronenberg-Mossberg said Lithuania had been chosen to host the conference as it saw the country as an important partner in implementing the project.
The project was recently awarded an additional €600 million euros, added to €3 billion euros to be used by 2013.
The conference on the EaP continues at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science tomorrow.
