With the approach to the Presidency of Latvia of the Council of the European Union, in order to disseminate information and stimulate discussion of the issues of the EU Eastern Partnership, the Centre for East European Policy Studies (CEEPS) has initiated, beginning with this October, a regular monitoring of the issues of the Eastern Partnership.
The CEEPS is going to follow Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Moldovan and Ukrainian political novelties and progress in talks on concluding of their Association Agreements with the EU. CEEPS researchers’ analytical articles on the timely topics in the Eastern Partnership field will be offered, including comments by the CEEPS’s cooperation partners, researchers from think-tanks of the Eastern Partnership member states. Foreign media articles on the topical issues will also be included.
Since the Eastern Partnership is one of the EU foreign policy priorities, and in 2015 Latvia will undertake the duties of presiding country of the EU, the CEEPS is going to inform a broader public, as well as promote the discussion of the European Neighbourhood Policy issues. Information, summarized in the course of the monitoring, will be presented to the audience of foreign policy makers and implementers, universities’ teaching staff, students, journalists and the other interested persons. The monitoring findings will be regularly publicized on the CEEPS’s Internet homepage, as well as spread among NGOs and the other organizations.
The monitoring has been launched by the article “New Breath in the European Union Eastern Partnership” by the CEEPS’s Executive Director in the portal www.ir.lv (The English translation is available here). Also in the future, the articles created within the monitoring will be publicized in various Latvian media and on the CEEPS’s Internet homepage.
About the EU Eastern Partnership:
Eastern Partnership is an EU program aimed at promotion of closer cooperation with six states in Eastern Europe and Southern Caucasus. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine are the program target countries.
These six countries receive from EU a relatively larger financial support for implementing their political and economic reforms. In case of their successful implementation, overall Association Agreements with the EU may be concluded, including free trade agreements and obligations in the sphere of energy supplies.
The Eastern Partnership may provide possibilities to the target states to sign free trade agreements, receive financial support and assistance in securing energy supplies, and travel visa-free. For the EU, that would mean more stability and security in its Eastern frontier area.