The Committee on Relations with Serbs Living Outside Serbia held its third sitting on 12 November 2008. The sitting was chaired by the Committee Chairman, Branimir Djokic and attended by the Minister of the Diaspora, Srdjan Sreckovic and associates, the Director of the Directorate of Development, Diaspora and Social Security Conventions, Vladislav Blagojevic and Vladimir Cucic, Commissioner of the Commissariat for Refugees of the Republic of Serbia.

Minister Sreckovic informed the Committee on the activities of the Ministry of the Diaspora in the July-October 2008 period and presented the Ministry’s work plan for the next six months. Sreckovic stressed that a normative basis is the condition for better cooperation and improvement of the relations between the Republic of Serbia and the members of Serbian communities outside the homeland, and that the first step is to work on passing a Bill on the Diaspora, whose draft version should be completed by 1 December of this year.

State Secretary Miodrag Jaksic presented the information on the position of the Serbian ethnic minority in the Republic of Croatia, and Commissioner Vladimir Cucic informed the Committee of the problems in realising proprietary, social and other status rights of Serbs exiled from the Republic of Croatia between 1991 and 1995.

The Committee members expressed their opinions, proposals and suggestions concerning the presented information. The Committee decided to form a working group to cooperate with the Ministry of the Diaspora and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs more intensely. Committee members Milorad Buha, Dr Janko Veselinovic and Aleksandar Cotric were elected members of the working group. The Committee members agreed that it is necessary to adopt a declaration on the position of refugees and internally displaced persons from the Republic of Croatia, as well as to contact all relevant ministries and state institutions in order to improve cooperation and further the relations between the Republic of Serbia and the Diaspora.

In the continuation, the Director of the Directorate of Development, Diaspora and Social Security Conventions, Vladislav Blagojevic made an agreement with the Committee members for direct cooperation between the Committee and the Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.