On 20th and 21st November, 2014, the conference “EU Integration and Minority Protection in the Western Balkans: mapping the way ahead” will take place in Sarajevo at the Radon Plaza Hotel. It is organized as part of the MAXCAP project and aims to evaluate the effectiveness of EU instruments and strategies for strengthening minority rights protection in the Western Balkans. EU officials and leaders, domestic politicians, civil society representatives, and academics will debate the integration capacity of enlargement tools from both a legal / institutional as well as a community / beneficiary perspective.
The attendees will participate in a series of roundtable discussions and workshops which intend, on the one hand, to take stock of existing initiatives and, on the other, to identify future agendas and priorities. The conference primarily focusses on national minorities, and LGBT communities from across candidate and potential candidate states.
Key goals of the conference:
- To assess the effectiveness of EU instruments and assistance directed at minority rights protection ‘on the ground’
- To examine the limits of EU conditionality in the Western Balkans by analyzing the several instruments and strategies employed by EU delegations and Brussels concerning the minority rights protection and to examine how these may be reformed and strengthened
- To formulate an interactive bottom-up approach to display previous findings on the issue in front of domestic leaders, EU officials academics and practitioners to discuss the future of minority protection in the region in light of recent political developments (e.g. Bosnian protests; anti-Cyrillic protests in Vukovar by veterans; inter-ethnic violence in Macedonia)
For further information please contact: Biljana Stojanoska, Balkan Civil Society Development Network, email: bst@balkancsd.net
