Thursday, October 31 2013

 The European Parliament's resolution on the European Neighborhood Policy has nothing to do with Armenia's decision to join the Customs Union. Nor does it imply any change in the European Parliament's attitude towards the country, Co-Chairman of the Armenia-EU Parliamentary Cooperation Commission Milan Cabrnoch said in an interview with ArmInfo.

When asked about his personal attitude towards the provision concerning Nagorno-Karabakh, Cabrnoch said that the resolution was adopted by a majority of the European parliamentarians and was an official document of the European Union.

In an earlier interview with ArmInfo, the Armenian Co-Chair of the Armenia-EU Parliamentary Cooperation Commission Samvel Farmanyan said that the provisions of the resolution ran counter to the European Union's official stance on the Karabakh conflict, as well as to the whole logic of the Karabakh peace process in the OSCE Minsk Group format. "I remember no other resolution to contain so rough and unilateral assessments divorced from the reality.  Certainly, here we cannot neglect the circumstance that the adoption of this resolution reflects the situational approach in relation to the latest developments (Armenia's decision to join the Customs Union - editor's note). I think our partners in the European Parliament are guided by wrong considerations", he said. 

At the plenary session of the European Parliament on 23 October, a draft resolution on the European Neighborhood was adopted.  Azerbaijani media outlets report that in the paragraph #16, the resolution "denounces the occupation by one country of the Eastern Partnership of the territory of another and states that the settlement of Armenian Azerbaijan Nagorno Karabakh Conflict should comply with UN Security Council Resolutions." The document "recalls its position that the occupation by one country of the Eastern Partnership of the territory of another violates the fundamental principles and objectives of the Eastern Partnership and that the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict should comply with UN Security Council resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884 of 1993 and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group Basic Principles, enshrined in the L'Aquila joint statement of 10 July 2009".