Prishtina, 5 July 2013
The Prime Minister of the Republic of Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi, participated in the regular meeting of the Visa Liberalization Steering Committee. In his opening remarks, Prime Minister Thaçi addressed the committee.
Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi started by saying that the visa liberalization process continues to remain a top priority for the Government and all the institutions of the Republic of Kosovo.
Following there is the complete address by Prime Minister Thaçi in the meeting:
As we have said in our previous meeting, the visa liberalization process continues to remain one of the key priorities for you and your staff in various ministries and agencies. For this reason, allow me to congratulate you on your engagement and of the other professional staff, who have shown outstanding diligence in this exceptionally important process.
However, there is still a lot to be done and the engagement of all of you should keep intensifying. We are not yet where we want to be. There is no visa liberalization yet and we cannot allow ourselves to be tired or to relax. So, now, more than ever, our efforts need to intensify.
We have gathered here to discuss the legal package surrounding the visa liberalization process, so that I expect to hear that you have incorporated Brussels’s comments in the visa liberalization draft laws, and I expect you to inform me that you have incorporated all the comments to a satisfactory extent, and I expect to hear that you have done this in close cooperation with the local and international institutions, and especially with the EU institutions, like the EU Liaison Office and EULEX.
I expect you to finalize all the necessary, legal, sublegal and strategic acts, and to complete this legislative package, while I also ask you to engage your staff in a fast and uncompromised implementation of all the requirements from the visa liberalization guide and to fully address Brussels’s recommendations.
We have declared this year as the year of the visa liberalization, so that I call on you all for maximal engagement in doing your homework, and while the final decision is to be taken by the EU institutions, you must not allow them the justification that failure to sufficiently implement the requirements has made it impossible to remove visas for the citizens of Kosovo
Honorable,
As I have stated earlier in previous meetings of this forum, citizens from other states in the region have been travelling visa free to the EU for more than four years, and because of this I insist and request maximal commitment and to maximally engage your staff to the benefit of the process, to allocate the necessary resources and to ensure that the process is intensifying and not slowing down.
You, honorable ministers, should hold your staff accountable on weekly basis as to the implementation of these requirements, you have the necessary experience and expertise, there is nothing unknown for you in this process, or something that cannot be done by you and your staff.
I call on you one more time not to stop even for a minute. I know that it is summer time, holiday time; however, I want you all to engage maximally.
Honorable Minister Çitaku, I want to thank you and your staff for your engagement in this process, asking you all for maximal and intensified engagement in the remaining period of time.
So, we will explore all the opportunities for cooperation, also inter-institutional, to fully implement all these requirements, so that these two three months are especially important and that all the obligations deriving from this meeting are implemented until the next meeting.
Last modified: July 31, 2022