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Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan: "Stability and prosperity on the European continent are major preconditions for closer cooperation"

23 July 2014 01:02 (UTC +04:00)

APA reports quoting press service of Minister of Foreign Affairs that Elmar Mammadyarov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan said at the Foreign Minister’s meeting of EU Member States and Eastern Partnership countries.

“Stability and prosperity on the European continent are major preconditions for closer cooperation. While favouring the bilateral format of cooperation with EU, since the inception of Eastern Partnership Azerbaijan has been engaged in the multilateral format. However, the ongoing occupation of the territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno Karabakh and seven adjacent regions by the Republic of Armenia, makes impossible to fully benefit from the multilateral framework of Eastern Partnership”, - the minister said.

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan said that the Republic of Armenia, which exercises overall effective control over the occupied territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan attempts to consolidate the current status quo and impose a fait accompli practices through sustaining the illegal economic activities in these territories: “The fraudulent trade exercise, which I mentioned above, is just one of the cases. Armenia should not enjoy the preferential treatment of the EU when it comes to imposing sanctions and other restrictive measures vis-à-vis those activities”.

Azerbaijani Minister noted Azerbaijan believes that the bilateral track should remain a priority in our dialogue with EU: “There is differentiation, there is uniqueness, and own pace of development and reform agenda of each of the Eastern Partner state – this approach must be preserved. We all should also recognize that Eastern partners should not feel any pressure to choose their level of cooperation with EU. Instead, an incentive-based approach should be vested in the differentiation mechanism itself. Mutual accountability will allow both sides to ensure a better inter-linkage among needs, aspirations and capacity of individual partners”.

“As far as the future of EU-Azerbaijan relations concerned, I would like to reaffirm our readiness to work on a legally binding document of strategic nature which will be based on mutual interest and shared priorities”, - Mr. Elmar Mammadyarov said.

Speaking about the upcoming future, Elmar Mammadyarov informed that Azerbaijan will be glad to host the next informal meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Ministers of Energy of the Eastern Partnership in Baku on 8-9 September of this year.