National Assembly Deputies Gordana Comic, Suzana Grubjesic, Milos Jevtic, Rade Obradovic, Oliver Dulic and Nenad Prokic today met students of the Belgrade Open School to discuss Serbia’s integration into the European Union and the role of the European Integration Committee in the process.

The Deputies told the students that Serbia’s path of European integration began in June 2003, when EU leaders met in the Greek city of Salonica to adopt a declaration affirming that the future of the Western Balkans was accession to the EU.

Subsequently, to ensure that the National Assembly was contributing adequately to Serbia’s accession to the EU, the previous Assembly convocation formed the European Integrations Committee, which has, together with the Government’s EU Integration Office, contributed a great deal to this effort, primarily in harmonising Serbian legislation with EU law, monitoring overall accession strategy implementation, as well as improving co-operation with parliaments of other European countries and those of the region. All this should provide insight into, and better understanding of, main EU integration currents.

In October 2004 the Serbian National Assembly adopted the Resolution on Joining the European Union – not unanimously, however, as Deputies of the Serbian Radical Party failed to take part. This means that no consensus was reached on this, one of the most important issues for the future of the country. In addition, no plenary debate was ever held in parliament on this issue. Therefore, according to the Deputies, the new parliament – all of its deputies’ groups – should agree on this issue, one of the most important priorities of Serbia, and reach consensus on the need to remove all political obstacles for resuming negotiations of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement. The main problem here is Serbia’s lack of co-operation with the Hague Tribunal, which led to the suspension of these negotiations.

The students expressed interest in whether Serbia was able to fulfil all its obligations and become a candidate for EU membership in 2013, as well as what needed to be done to improve Serbia’s image with other nations.

The Deputies said it was ‘still too early to mention any dates,’ as well as that efforts would be made to accelerate the process and improve the picture of Serbia in other countries’ public opinion. An obstacle to this was the ‘low degree of education and knowledge about the “European family of nations” in Serbia’s public,’ as well as a lack of professionals to be employed by the Assembly to assist Deputies engaged in integration-related activities.