Visa Facilitation Conference

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. Read more...