The European Union formally launched a “mobility partnership” with Belarus on Thursday 13 October.
The partnership, in which seven member states – Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania – will participate, will seek to ensure that the movement of people between the EU and Belarus is better managed. It establishes a set of political objectives and identifies a number of areas in which further dialogue and cooperation between the EU and Belarus will be established in order to ensure that the migration flows are managed as effectively as possible.
Under the mobility partnership, measures will be launched to increase cooperation in the areas of legal and labour migration, asylum and the protection of refugees, prevention and combating of irregular migration, including smuggling of migrants and trafficking in human beings, and maximising the development impact of migration and mobility,
Together with the visa facilitation and readmission agreements which are still being negotiated, the partnership -– negotiations on which began on 1 June 2015 – will be a key instrument in developing EU-Belarus cooperation on migration.
In 2015, the number of Schengen visa applications made in Belarus was 752,782. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)