Bulgaria's Minister of Interior Participates in a Meeting Between Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia and Albania

Bulgaria's Minister of Interior Valentin Radev participated in a quadripartite meeting between Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia and Albania, held in Thessaloniki on 5th of October. The main topics of the meeting were migration, countering terrorism and organized crime. The participants focused on the need for rapid exchange of information between different services for the purposes of immediate response and prevention.

Within the meeting, Minister Valentin Radev also held bilateral meetings. Radev and the Greek Minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection, Nikolaos Toskas expressed readiness to maintain and build upon the active political dialogue between the two Ministries of Interior, established since the beginning of 2016. They stressed that the operational cooperation with the Greek police is at a very high level.

They pointed out that the best European and Schengen practices are applied - parallel investigations and joint operations, effective work of the bilateral joint police and customs cooperation centre in Promahon and the trilateral centre with Turkey at the Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint - joint patrols in the resorts.

At the meeting with the Macedonian Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski, the two ministers also expressed readiness to maintain active contacts at political and professional level to strengthen co-operation in the field of home affairs, both bilaterally and within different regional formats. Minister Radev thanked Spasovski for stepping-up the security of the Bulgarian Embassy in Skopje, provided at Bulgaria's request. He expressed hope that his Macedonian counterpart would personally take part in the EU-Western Balkans Ministerial Meeting on Justice and Home Affairs on 26-27 October 2017 in Sofia.

For the EU...