Declaration on Cross-Border Cooperation in a Wider Europe signed

The conference, the first of its kind, was completed this Friday in Kosice, eastern Slovakia. It was attended by a wide range of expert organizations and representatives of local, regional and national authorities from a total of sixteen countries. All in various ways engages in cross-border cooperation along the eastern rim of the European Union, the conference participants voiced their concern about the situation and presented several concrete proposals how to improve the situation.

The Barents Secretariat has been one of the initiators of the conference.

A declaration adopted at the conference reads that “current obstacles to East-West cooperation, stretching geographically from the Barents Sea in the North to the Black Sea in the South, hinder human contacts, curb economic development, restrain political relations, and create new dividing lines”.

Read more: Declaration on Cross-Border Cooperation in a Wider Europe (.pdf)

The main challenges in cross-border , the conference participants highlighted, are linked with the current visa regulations; inefficient border crossing procedures; complicated and conflicting legislation; lack of accurate information and data; corruption; insufficient border crossing infrastructure; lack of political engagement and support; trade restrictions and excessive bureaucracy.

Most of these challenges are easily identified all along the eastern border of the EU, and should therefore be address jointly by different border regions, the declaration highlights. Among the conference participants were also the deputy foreign ministers of Slovakia, Ukraine and Norway. EU Commission was represented by Vice-President Sevcovic, who spoke to the forum by video conference.

The conference, which is part of a bigger project on cross-border cooperation, started on Wednesday in the Ukrainian border town of Uzhgorod and on Thursday moved on to Kosice on the Slovak side of the border. The event was organized under the auspices of the European Border Dialogues network

The European Border Dialogues network was established in 2009 and includes several organizations specializing on cross-border cooperation, among them the Norwegian Barents Secretariat, the Institute of Stability (Prague), the Institute of Cross-Border Cooperation (Uzhgorod), the Jefferson Institute (Belgrade) and the Kaliningrad Regional Development Agency. The network intends to facilitate cross-border relations in Europe by developing new monitoring and analysis tools for cross-border cooperation, elaborate models for training and capacity building programmes and establish a so-called flexible response mechanism.

Read more about the network atwww.borderdialogues.eu