SEECP adopts document, Serbia has reserves

BELGRADE – Parliamentary delegations of the South-East European Cooperation Process (SEECP) member states adopted in Bucharest on Sunday a statement about the situation in Ukraine, and the Serbian delegation did not block it despite having reservations about positions taken regarding Crimea, head of the Serbian delegation Veroljub Arsic said on the same day.

“Our delegation had reservations about the part of the statement where the annexation of Crimea is explicitly mentioned. We felt that this phrase was unnecessary, since the next stance speaks about Ukraine’s territorial integrity," Arsic told Tanjug over the phone late on Sunday.

He added that all the other delegations supported the adoption of the document.

It was the inaugural session of the SEECP Parliamentary Assembly on Sunday, and the Serbian delegation’s position was that such a document on the crisis in Ukraine should not even have been debated at the meeting of inaugural character, he said.

Arsic said that the draft statement was put forward - at the initiative by the holder of the 2013-1014 SEECP chairmanship-in-office, Romania - on Saturday, late in the afternoon, and the Serbian delegation neither accepted nor rejected the proposal at that particular moment because all parties could put forward their own drafts.

“Today we had a meeting where we tried to agree on a joint draft statement and we thought that that the first operative paragraph, stance five, was uncalled for, as another stance expresses support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and international law,” Arsic said.

“We felt that this was tendentious, and as a delegation of the Serbian parliament, we expressed reservation about what we deemed unnecessary...