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Activities

2 August 2023 The participants of the meeting

Wednesday, 2 August 2023

Kovacs and Filipovski Meet with French and Austrian Parliamentarians

European Integration Committee Chairperson Elvira Kovacs and Deputy Chairperson Dubravka Filipovski met with the member of the National Assembly of the Republic of France Liliana Tanguy and the member of the National Council of the Parliament of the Republic of Austria Reinhold Lopatka, currently in visit to the Republic of Serbia.

The officials exchanged opinions on possible future cooperation within the TAIEX (Technical Assistance and Information Exchange instrument of the European Commission) set up to provide support to new EU member states, candidate and other countries in harmonising national regulations with the EU acquis and their implementation.

They agreed that it is very important to include members of national parliaments in empowerment and capacity building projects in the harmonisation and application of domestic legislation with European ones, as until now only the parliament support services were involved in these projects. They stressed that this confirms and highlights the important role the parliamentarians play in the European integration process.

European Integration Committee Chairperson Elvira Kovacs said that, within these projects, it would be useful to consider the new accession talks methodology and its impact on the Serbian negotiation process, as well as the cooperation between the National Assembly and the Government in Serbia’s EU accession negotiations.

Committee Deputy Chairperson Dubravka Filipovski spoke of the cooperation so far within the framework of existing initiatives. She pointed out that it is extremely important for Serbia to have a partnership with European countries and receive concrete positive signals from the EU, since the European integration process has been taking such a long time.

Kovacs and Filipovski added that the last negotiation cluster was opened a year and a half ago, and for the reasons mentioned, Euroscepticism is growing among the citizens of Serbia.