Azernews.Az

BAKU – Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will visit Warsaw in September to attend a summit on the European Union’s Eastern Partnership program, Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry quoted the country’s ambassador to Poland as saying.

Hasan Hasanov said in the Polish Seim (parliament) that the president’s visit would give an incentive to Azerbaijan’s integration into the EU and expand its relations with Poland.

Addressing the Seim’s commission dealing with Eastern Partnership, which aims to boost the EU’s cooperation with its ex-Soviet partners, the ambassador said his country was interested in European integration and attached great importance to Eastern Partnership in this respect.

Eastern Partnership is a Polish-Swedish initiative under the EU Neighborhood Policy aimed at improving EU relations with former Soviet countries Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine and Armenia. The program envisages the allocation of 600 million euros to these countries until 2013 to strengthen state institutions, control borders and help small companies. The program does not envisage EU membership, but instead covers facilitating the visa regime, energy cooperation, and the introduction of free trade zones. Small projects on student exchange, environmental protection, and energy supply will also be implemented.

Touching on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, Ambassador Hasanov expressed disappointment that despite Azerbaijan’s being the EU’s reliable partner and the strategic bilateral cooperation, EU officials do not unequivocally support the country’s territorial integrity. He noted that illegal visits have been paid by European Parliament members to the Armenia-occupied Nagorno Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, but there has been no official condemnation of such visits by the EU.