Balkans

Macedonia will enter the European Union before Turkey, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Thursday, congratulating Skopje in advance during his visit to the Balkan country. “On the EU process, I believe Macedonia will enter the EU before Turkey. The process continues at a fast pace. We are a …

Serbia should return to the negotiating table as soon as possible and focus on its priorities, European Parliament (EP) Rapporteur Jelko Kacin has stated. He added that Serbia’s priorities are not entirely clear now when the EU candidate status is within reach.

Greek prime minister George Papandreou plans to meet with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris Friday for talks on Greece’s financial crisis. Their meeting comes as auditors from the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Union are in

The European Commission is not going to issue an official statement or comment on tensions in Bulgaria because this is an internal problem for the country and the responsibility of its cabinet. The information was reported Thursday by Bulgaria’s EU Commissioner

The inability of political leaders to reach consensus on key reforms within in Albania is delaying the country’s progress towards European Union candidacy, a report published by the Open Society Foundation in Albania, OSFA, has shown.

Minority groups in Serbia are preparing to boycott the country’s census due to disagreements over the ethnicity of data collectors and the language the census forms have been written in. Ethnic Albanians in South Serbia and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) from the southwestern region

The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, will monitor the October 23 local and presidential elections in Bulgaria. ODHIR has opened in Sofia on Tuesday a Limited Mission for Election Assessment, Vadim Zhdanovich, Head of the OSCE/ODIHR Assessment …

EULEX Spokesman Nicholas Hawton said on Wednesday that a EULEX prosecutor would investigate the Tuesday events at the Jarinje checkpoint. “EULEX is assessing the circumstance of the violence with the view to launch an investigation into what happened,” Hawton said, adding that the

Montenegro expects to get a positive opinion from the EU regarding fulfillment of conditions for the EU accession in October. EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule will bring the good news to Podgorica on October 13. A day after the European Commission publishes opinion about fulfillment of conditions for Montenegro’s European …

The last Dutch peacekeepers in Bosnia will leave next month after a two-decade mission overshadowed by the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. “We are ending the mission at the end of October when the largest part of our troops return home, except for …