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Lithuania ensures support to Azerbaijan’s rapprochement with EU

Petras Vaida, BC, Vilnius, 04.04.2012.Print version
On the official visit to Baku, Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Audronius Azubalis held meetings with the Azerbaijani leadership and ensured Lithuania's support to Azerbaijan's rapprochement with the EU through the Eastern partnership initiative, invited this South Caucasus country to join the project of the freight train Viking, reports BC the MFA.

Audronius Azubalis and Ilham Aliyev. Baku, 2.04.2012. Photo: urm.lt

On April 2, Azubalis met with President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, Prime Minister Artur Rasizade and Minister of Foreign Affairs Elmar Mammadyarov.

 

Lithuanian foreign minister stressed Lithuania's support to Azerbaijan's aim to intensify the dialogue with the EU and congratulated the country's leaders on launching visa facilitation and readmission negotiations with Brussels.

 

According to Azubalis, the development of the EU's Eastern Partnership initiative will be among key priorities of Lithuania's Presidency of the Council of the EU in the second half of 2013. The minister called on Azerbaijan to actively continue the negotiations on Association Agreement with the EU, which could be wrapped up during Lithuania's Presidency.

 

The EU's Eastern Partnership initiative foresees specific measures for strengthening the EU's relations with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, including free trade agreements and liberalisation of the visa regime. Lithuania's Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2013 is to host the Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius.

 

Never before have bilateral relations between Lithuania and Azerbaijan been advanced as intensively: high level visits and intensive academic exchanges are being organised, and Lithuanian institutions are offering to share their own reform experience.

 

The Seimas (Parliament) of Lithuania and Special Investigation Service (STT), in cooperation with corresponding Azerbaijani institutions, have successfully implemented the EU Twinning projects aimed to help Azerbaijan reach European standards. At the meetings, Azubalis stressed that Lithuania was ready to continue to provide expert assistance.

 

Business forums are organised and enterprises take part in exhibitions in Azerbaijan to advance bilateral economic relations.

 

"Although Lithuanian enterprises successfully find their niche in the market of Azerbaijan, the potential of economic cooperation has not been exhausted. There are many opportunities for developing cooperation in the fields of information technology, construction, ecology, tourism and in other spheres," Lithuanian foreign minister said.

 

According to him, Azerbaijan's joining the project of the container train Viking would intensify bilateral trade relations and open up the potential in economic cooperation.

 

The train Viking is a joint project of the railways of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, connecting the Baltic and Black sea regions. The train Viking covers its route of 1734 km in 52 hours and crosses the external EU border just in 30 minutes. Conversations with the leadership of Azerbaijan focused also on the region's security situation. Azubalis emphasized that Lithuania explicitly supported only a peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the effort of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to resolve the conflict.

 

The minister once again called on the countries to promote civil society dialogue and to implement confidence-building measures, such as mechanism to investigate incidents on the line of contact in Nagorno-Karabakh.

 

"The civil society dialogue is one of the requirements for conflict settlement," Azubalis said.

 

The meetings also discussed Lithuania's concerns over the nuclear projects of Belarus and Russia's Kaliningrad region that failed to meet international nuclear safety standards, and the Lithuania-Azerbaijan cooperation within international organisations.






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