On Friday, 9 June, the Saeima will host a conference organised by the Baltic Assembly (BA) focused on the current situation and future prospects in the cooperation between the European Union (EU) and the Eastern Partnership countries.
“Close cooperation with the Eastern Partnership countries is crucial for ensuring peace and prosperity throughout Europe. This cooperation needs to be as efficient as possible and go beyond the political level, it needs to bring the people of the EU and partner countries together thus paving the way for exchange of culture and experience,” says Dr.Jānis Vucāns, Vice-President of the BA and Head of the Latvian delegation.
Dr.Vucāns emphasises that this will be strategically important international conference, which will bring together representatives of the Benelux Parliament, the GUAM Parliamentary Assembly consisting of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova, the Nordic Council and the Visegrad countries.
The conference “Together in Strengthening Our Cooperation” will be opened by Ināra Mūrniece, Speaker of the Saeima, and Aadu Must, President of the BA.
The first session of the conference will be devoted to EU relations with Eastern neighbours and their perspectives. The participants will talk about the role of parliaments in enabling the partners to achieve sustainable results, as well as the way GUAM countries should proceed further with their reform process to form a more prosperous and developed region.
In turn, the second session will focus on people-to-people contacts as the pulse of the Eastern Partnership. The participants will discuss the best practices accumulated by parliaments to stimulate and improve people-to-people contacts and exchange of expertise, business-to-business contacts, visa liberalisation, as well as youth, education and cultural exchange programmes and how to promote them and make them more accessible.
The Eastern Partnership is a common platform for EU cooperation with six eastern neighbours: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
The Conference “Together in Strengthening Our Cooperation” will take place on Friday, 9 June, from 9:00 till 13:30 in the Baltic Hall of the Saeima, at Jēkaba iela 6/8.
About the BA:
The Baltic Assembly is an interparliamentary cooperation organisation of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania established on 8 November 1991. Each national parliament of the Baltic States is represented in the Baltic Assembly by 12 to 20 members of parliament. It is a coordinating and consultative organisation which has a right to express its opinion to the national parliaments and governments of the Baltic States, as well as the Baltic Council of Ministers, in the form of resolutions, decisions, declarations and recommendations; it also has a right to request the above-mentioned bodies to provide information on cross-border issues that are high on the Baltic Assembly’s agenda.
Saeima Press Service