On June 19, in Luxembourg, Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian participated in the Eastern Partnership ministerial meeting. Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and Johannes Hahn, European Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, as well as Foreign Ministers of the EU and Eastern Partnership countries attended the meeting and delivered speeches.

In his remarks, Edward Nalbandian underlined: “Needless to say that approaching the upcoming summit with tangible results will contribute to the future productive cooperation in the framework of the Eastern Partnership.”

Speaking about the Armenia-EU political dialogue, Edward Nalbandian noted, that in this regard the past two years have been quite intensive: “These past two years we have been actively working on the implementation of the provisions of the Riga Declaration and have been able to deliver in almost all mutual commitments relating to Armenia, namely joining COSME and HORIZON 2020 programs, launching negotiations on the Common Aviation Area Agreement, as well as the “Creative Europe”, that we intend to finalize soon.
There are also some pending issues that we are looking forward to deal with, including the launching of the Visa Liberalization Dialogue. We count on the clear support of the EU member states in this regard.
Within a relatively short time-frame we managed to negotiate the new Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement. The completion of the negotiations was announced by Presidents Sargsyan and Tusk in February in Brussels. The text has been initialed and we look forward to sign it at the upcoming summit.
Almost in parallel we discussed and agreed on the Partnership Priorities for 2017-2020. These two important documents will guide Armenia-EU partnership in coming years and help us to strengthen our mutually beneficial cooperation.”

Foreign Minister of Armenia emphasized that Armenia highly appreciates the EU’s continued assistance, including through the Eastern Partnership initiative, provided to our country over the years for the effective implementation of the reform process and institutional capacity building in Armenia.

In his remarks Edward Nalbandian highly valued the provision by the European Commission and the European External Action Service of the “20 deliverables for 2020” document that not only offers a good action plan for the coming years but also a new revised architecture of the Eastern Partnership, which is directly linked to the performance of the partner countries within this multilateral framework and more importantly to the political will to deliver on the shared commitments. Foreign Minister Nalbandian underlined that the principle of differentiation offers a unique opportunity to develop a multi-track or multi-layer cooperation, thus allowing to maintain the integrity of the partnership.