TIRANA, Sept 8 /ATA/ EU Commissioner for Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Oliver Várhelyi urges the German authorities to hold the first intergovernmental conferences with Albania and North Macedonia as part of the opening of negotiations under their Presidency of the European Union Council.
In his remarks at the forum “The future of enlargement from a European perspective” held in Berlin, the EU Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement Negotiations Várhelyi said : My pledge – being herein Berlin, I’m meeting various representatives of the German government later on today – is to make a bold step and the German Presidency of the EU Council should be able to have the first IGCs with these countries. It is possible, we see the conditions are there, we just need to speed up all the work and we can get there. So let’s try and get the first IGCs in December under the German Presidency.
“But we need to know what is the political aim of the process and its political outcome, overall and of each subject discussed, with leaders and politicians in charge of running the process, so this is not just a formality. This requires full engagement of the leaders and in March they endorsed our decision to open accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia, and in May we held, despite the COVID crisis, the EU-Western Balkans video summit meeting, confirming a strong political choice made, with leaders standing by it.”
“We made it clear to our partners that once the conditions are met, we will also deliver; if the conditions are not met, we do not deliver. It also means that we need to clarify what is expected, make the criteria touchable and seeable, measurable more than before. This is what we are working on with Albania and North Macedonia.”
“In parallel to this, as the second pillar, the decision to open accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia was finally taken. This could not have been done without the revised enlargement methodology – that was the proposal that broke the ground and helped us get the acceptance for the opening of accession talks,” Várhelyi said.
Following on, he said, we have already proposed the negotiating frameworks for both countries, and now the Council is already discussing them and when and how to have the first intergovernmental conferences with the two countries.
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