Kosovo- Serbia continues next week at chief negotiator level

Kosovo's chief negotiator for these meetings is Deputy Prime Minister Besnik Bislimi, while Serbia's leader of the Office for Kosovo in the Government of Serbia, Petar Petkovic.

At this meeting it is said that the focus will be on implementing the Agreement on normalisation of relations for which Kosovo and Serbia have reached compliance on February 27th, as well as on the implementation annex, which the parties agreed on on March 18th in Ohrid, North Macedonia.

Stano has expressed satisfaction that, as he has said, dialogue is becoming more popular in the region and that more and more meetings are being organised.

He has thus stated, referring to a proposal by Montenegrin technical mandate Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic, that the next meeting between Kosovo and Serbia be held in the state he heads.

We are pleased that dialogue is becoming so popular in the region, and more and more countries are offering to be its host. But let's go step by step. The dialogue is based on Brussels and we have achieved a very important step in Ohrid, after achieving compliance between the president of Serbia and the prime minister of Kosovo, where they agreed on both the Agreement and the annex of implementation. Now the focus is on implementing”, he said.

Stano has also talked about steps taken after the Ohrid meeting.

We have had a meeting at the Foreign Affairs Council, where High Representative [Joseph Borrell] announced to the ministers. Then he informed other partners. We also had the European Council, where the leaders approved this, and ordered both sides that they should proceed with rapid implementation, with the trust of the obligations they have taken on themselves“.

Stano has warned that within the EU it is working to resume work on adopting the negotiative framework with Serbia, more precisely Chapter 35, and in the case of Kosovo.

“Dialogue as such continues. There will be other high-level meetings we will announce when appropriate. What I can say right now is that a meeting of the chief negotiators will take place next week in Brussels. The chief negotiators on both sides have been invited by the facilitator of the dialogue to come to Brussels and advance with the first steps for implementing all that has agreed to”, Stano has said, among other things.

According to the EU's top diplomat, Borell, Kosovo and Serbia have reached compliance in Ohrid for the application of the Agreement for normalising relations between the two countries, though no documents have been signed.

But, in the EU, they have reiterated that even without signing these documents, they are considered binding for both sides, and that all attempts to question them are in vain. /Rel