VISA FACILITATION PROJECT

ECAS is happy to announce that the project "Does it really matter? Visa facilitation in the Western Balkans: Monitoring of the New Agreements" supported by the King Boudouin Foundation as well as the Open Society Institutes in Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania has so far been a real success in terms of the number of callers on the national hotlines as well as the media coverage and attention. It has truly hit a cord with the larger civil society in the region. The results of the surveys with the visa applicants are being processed and we will be launching a final report before the end of 2008.

Please find below the Country progress reports as well as a press release based on the conclusion which can already be drawn in terms of the implementation of the Visa Facilitation Agreements in the region.

Press Release (download here )

The Final Hotline Report (download here )

Country Progress Reports:

Visa Facilitation Conference

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 Crowne Plaza Hotel, 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. However, a monitoring conducted in the region by local organisations* has showed that the implementation of these agreements by EU 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.

*Organisations from Western Balkans that have conducted the monitoring in the region are: Macedonian Center for International Cooperation, European Movement, Albania; Vesta-Bosnia and Herzegovina, Centre for Civic Education-Montenegro and Citizens’ Pact for SEE-Serbia

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask Kenan Hadzimusic at: tel: +32 2 548 04 93 or email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

ECAS is supported by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission.