Janis A. Emmanouilidis, Stavros Costopoulos Research Fellow at ELIAMEP, participated and spoke in the concluding session of a conference on Generating Georgia’s Input for the Eastern Partnership. In the course of the conference participants discussed the perspectives of Eastern Partnership, which will be officially launched at a summit on May 7, 2009 and which intends to intensify the relations of the EU with six countries in Eastern Europe and the Southern Caucasus – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine. The conference dealt with (i) the political background and objectives of Eastern Partnership, (ii) its institutional setting, (iii) cooperation in specific sectoral fields of cooperation, and finally (iv) the significance of Eastern Partnership for conflict resolution especially in the Southern Caucasus.
The list of participants included representatives of the Georgian government and a number of EU experts from EU member states and Georgia. The conference was organized by the Regional Office South Caucasus of the Heinrich Böll Foundation and took place in Tbilisi, Georgia on 19 March 2009.