Conference of Visegrad Group and region’s foreign ministers

Thank you, and this is important and great initiative. And it's great that so many people have decided to participate in this. I think all of us agreed on two things:

the first one is that the EU membership perspective has to be kept alive for the rest of the Balkans countries and have to be kept real, and

the second is that the transfer of know-how works; that it is important to get exposed and to get inside in to the experience of the countries that have joined earlier, and that's probably why transitional countries are particularly interested into the experience of countries that went through political transition is particularly important.

With that in minds, we have actually started and formed something that we call Central Excellence, and it is working. We've had so far 2 very specific seminars: one on fitosanitary standards in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the other on judiciary and fundamental rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And we have 2 more planned by the end of the year: one on the integrated border management, and the other on competition policy. We are in the process of signing bilateral agreement on Euro-Atlantic cooperation with Bosnia and Herzegovina. We have already signed such an agreement with Montenegro. Team from Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration of Montenegro has been to Zagreb for three days working with our people on practical experience in organizing the negotiations team and working within the negotiations team, on cooperation and coordination of work among different ministries.

On 29th-30th October we will have also training seminar for civil servants and journalists relating to presentation of NATO and NATO tasks in countries who are inspiring to join NATO. So, we are in the process. I’ve just had a meeting with deputy prime minister of Serbia in charge for European integration. She will come to Zagreb on 27th November and we are in the process of renewing our Agreement on cooperation in European integration issues.

In our part of Europe we're focused on institution building and on state building. And this is the most important aspect on the practical level of the whole exercise. Therefore, we think it should start. We have now some of the money from our own budget, but we are also cooperating with UNDP, and our Chamber of Commerce and other institutions.