First Historic Meeting of EU Leaders and League of Arab States

The first ever summit of leaders of the European Union and the League of Arab States took place, held two days in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh.

The meeting opened 74-year-old Abdel Fatah Sissi, who since 2014 is the sixth president of Egypt, and since this month has assumed the presidency of the African Union. He met heads of state and government of 24 of the 28 countries in the European Union and 15 of the 22 Arab League countries. The other countries in the two organizations are represented at a lower level. Syria, whose membership in the Arab League has been frozen since 2011, is not participating until the plan to stop the bloodshed.

On the European side, only Spain, Latvia, Lithuania and France are represented by foreign ministers instead of head of state or prime minister.

 On the lower side of the Arab side, Prime Minister or Speaker of Parliament is represented only by Jordan, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, the UAE and Sudan.

The topic of the plenary sessions of the First European Union - Arab League League Meeting is "Strengthening the Euro-Arab Partnership and Together Addressing Global Challenges". On the agenda are the issues of multilateralism, trade and investment, migration, terrorism, security and the situation in the region.

More than 750 journalists have been accredited for the meeting.

"I have worked very hard for this meeting, so that the European Council is here now because, despite the diametrically opposed views and attitudes in this part of the world, after all, they (the Arabs) are a very important partner. Once as a generator of relations - you remember the Arab Spring, the huge migration wave that can come from Africa to Europe and everything else, "Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov told...