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Campaigners for visa-free travel invite people to ask officials when they will start visa talks with EU

 

Campaigners for a visa-free regime between Belarus and the European Union have invited common people to send emails to Belarusian officials to ask them when they will start visa facilitation talks with the EU.

“Every citizen of Belarus has the right to ask officials when visa talks with the EU will finally begin,” activists of the campaign, “To Belarus and Europe Without Visa,” say in a statement. “Such a question may be put, for example, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or to your lawmakers of different levels.”

The EU’s Foreign Affairs Council invited Belarus as far back as June 2011 to start visa facilitation talks, but Minsk has given no indication that it wants to hold such talks.

Moldova, Russia and Ukraine signed visa facilitation and readmission agreements with the EU a long time ago, securing a lower Schengen visa fee for their citizens. Similar agreements with Armenia are to take effect in the next few months. Visa facilitation talks between the EU and Azerbaijan are currently in progress. Belarus may thus become the only country involved in the EU’s Eastern Partnership program whose citizens have to pay €60 and not €35 for a Schengen visa. Moldova, Russia and Ukraine have made considerable progress toward the introduction of a visa-free regime with the EU.

In order to achieve a visa-free regime with the EU, a non-EU country needs to sign visa facilitation and readmission agreements and then meet a series of conditions in the areas of border control, personal document security, public order and security, and human rights. // BelaPAN