News

SERBIAN AND KOSOVO PARLIAMENTARIANS DISCUSS THE CURRENT STATE OF DIALOGUE

After about seven years of dialogue and moderate progress on a number of issues ranging from car license plates to university diplomas, Pristina and Belgrade are gradually sliding back into a pre-dialogue status quo. Sporadic meetings between Serbian and Kosovo presidents Vucic and Thaci are all that is left from the seven-year-old Brussels dialogue. The 2013 Brussels agreement itself has not been implemented in full, with the Association/Community of Serb-Majority Municipalities and energy remaining the most sensitive unimplemented points. The communication between Pristina and Belgrade officials is at all time low since 2011. The last meeting of the technical teams took place in March 2018. Apart from the meetings of the presidents, no other institutional contacts exist on regular basis.

 

To contribute to improving institutional relations between Pristina and Belgrade, CIG in cooperation with the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) and the Balkan Trust for Democracy of the German Marshall Fund of the United States convened another roundtable in a series for members of parliaments of Serbia and Kosovo. The roundtable took place on October 6, 2018 in Skopje, Macedonia. The aim of the parliamentary initiative is to build momentum and support for reaching a normalization agreement, to establish another institutional channel of dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, and to establish friendly political and economic relations between Kosovo and Serbia. The role of parliaments is especially relevant in ratifying an eventual agreement, but also in offering their input in shaping the process as well as a contributing to the content of the final agreement. Below is a short report on the meeting.