Brnabic at the conference on Serbia's accession to the EU

Brnabic at the conference on Serbia's accession to the EU

Country's progress on the path to European integration and four new opened negotiating chapters will be discussed at the conference.

The intergovernmental conference between the EU and Serbia starts at 8 a.m. in the building of the EU Council, and after the meeting, Prime Minister Brnabic and EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell will address the media. The Serbian delegation, led by Prime Minister Brnabic and Minister for European Integration Jadranka Joksimovic, will also meet with EU Enlargement Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi before the conference, it was confirmed to Tanjug in Brussels.

On Monday, answering questions from journalists in Belgrade, Brnabic reminded that the opening of Cluster 4 would be noted at the Intergovernmental Conference, and assessed that it was great news for Serbia and a clear signal for its European integration.

"These are as many as four new chapters. This is phenomenal news for all of us in Serbia, for our country, not only because it is a clear signal for our European integration, but also because it is a cluster concerning the green agenda and the environment, and in that sense, by opening that cluster, the EU has given a clear signal of how much Serbia has done in the last few years to meet the goals we needed to achieve to open those four chapters", Brnabic said.

Prime Minister says that the opening of Cluster 4 represents a great recognition of the EU for everything that Serbia has done so far when it comes to environmental protection. In that sense, she reminds that the European Commission stated in an official statement that the Government of Serbia respects the strictest environmental standards and that in that sense they will continue to work with Serbia and thus deal with the Rio Tinto project.

In its report this year, the European Commission recommended the opening of two clusters with Serbia (clusters 3 and 4), and member states gave the "green light" last week to open cluster 4, which refers to the Green Agenda and sustainable connectivity. Within Cluster 4, Serbia will open negotiations in the chapters on transport policy, energy, trans-European networks, as well as the chapter on environment and climate change.

So far, according to the old methodology of accession negotiations, Serbia has opened 18 chapters, two of which have been temporarily closed. At the previous Intergovernmental Conference, held at the end of June in Luxembourg, it was stated that Serbia, formally, according to the new methodology, already has the first so-called fundamental cluster concerning the rule of law, the functioning of democratic institutions and economic criteria.

Within the accession negotiations with the EU, Serbia has 33 chapters divided into six clusters.