BRUSSELS – Montenegro will provisionally close three negotiating chapters with the EU at today’s accession conference in Brussels. It is the first time since 2017 that the country is closing chapters, in a sign of the acceleration of its EU accession process.
This will be the seventeenth EU-Montenegro accession conference and will be held on the ministerial level. Prime Minister Milojko Spajić is also attending the conference.
“This will crown an extremely successful year for Montenegro, in terms of European integration, during which a positive IBAR (Interim Benchmark Assessment Report for Chapters 23 and 24) was obtained, the Reform Agenda was adopted, and all technical conditions for the closure of Chapter 31 were met”, Spajić’s office stated.
Montenegro will provisionally close Chapter 7 – Intellectual property law, Chapter 10 – Information society and media and Chapter 20 – Enterprise and industrial policy.
In order to meet the requirements for joining the EU, a candidate country needs to provisionally close all 33 negotiating chapters.
Previously, Montenegro closed Chapter 25 – Science and research in 2012, Chapter 26 – Education and culture in 2013 and Chapter 30 – External relations in 2017. It did not close a negotiating chapter in the past seven years.
The closing of the chapters was made possible by Montenegro meeting the interim benchmarks in the area of the rule of law, which was confirmed by the European Union in June.
With all 33 chapters opened and six chapters provisionally closed, Montenegro is the most advanced candidate country. Serbia, the second most advanced country in this regard, has so far opened 22 chapters and provisionally closed two.
According to Al Jazeera, Montenegro was also ready to close Chapter 31 – Common foreign and security policy, but this was blocked by Croatia due to bilateral issues between the two countries, including demarcation and processing of war crimes stemming from the 1990s.