European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) and King Baudouin Foundation (KBF) have great pleasure to invite you to take part in the conference « Does it really matter ? Visa facilitation in the Western Balkans : Monitoring of the new agreements ». The event will be held on 10 December 2008 in the Crown Plaza Hotel Europe, in Brussels, Belgium.
The Visa Facilitation Agreements (VFA) signed by the EU with five countries of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia) came into force on the 1 January 2008. They were intended to facilitate people to people contacts between the citizens of the EU and WB and allow certain categories of citizens to travel and conduct business in the Schengen zone without over-burdensome administrative procedures.
- Programme
However, a monitoring conducted in the region by local organizations has showed that the implementation of these agreements by member states is defective and that the VFAs are simply not achieving results for which they were designed. Moreover, striking differences in implementation of the VFAs between different EU member states have been recorded.
If you would like to attend this event we kindly ask you to confirm your presence by replying to this e-mail before Friday 21 November 2008.
Amar Causevic
Project Assistant
ECAS-European Citizen Action Service
Rue du Prince Royal 83
1050 Bruxelles
tel : +32 (0) 2 548 04 94
e-mail : amar.causevic@ecas.org
