EU, Georgia forge open skies aviation agreement
By Jeff Mason

BRUSSELS, Sept 27 (Reuters) – Georgia has agreed to an “open skies”
aviation pact that will allow European Union airlines to fly to
the former Soviet republic from any EU city, the 25-nation bloc’s
executive Commission said on Monday.

The agreement follows a decision by the European Court of Justice
in 2002 that ruled bilateral deals between individual EU countries
and the United States broke European rules that create a single
internal market.

Such agreements would prevent, for example, a French carrier from
flying to a U.S. city from a British airport.

The European Commission was granted a mandate after the court
ruling to negotiate a new U.S.-EU agreement and to eliminate similar
discrimination in pacts with other countries such as Georgia.

The latest agreement, which has been initialled by both sides but
still needs to be signed, will allow EU airlines to start in any EU
city en route to Georgia, the Commission said in a statement.

Bilateral agreements remain in place, but the new pact will remove
their illegal, discriminatory aspects.

“Both delegations welcomed the agreement as a concrete step forward
in the development of the overall relationship between the EU and
Georgia, and in particular as the beginning of the strengthening in
their relations in the field of air transport,” the Commission said.

The pact replaces those aspects of the bilateral accords that were
discriminatory without negotiating a new, more wide-ranging deal,
thus making it a “horizontal agreement,” a Commission spokesman said.

A similar agreement has also been forged with Chile.

The Commission has been negotiating toward a more wide-ranging
open skies pact with the United States that includes new ownership
rules. The latest deal between the two sides was rejected by EU
ministers in June largely because it lacked significant opening of
U.S. domestic routes to European airlines.

A U.S.-EU agreement is seen as a precursor to eventual mega-mergers
between airlines on both sides of the Atlantic.

09/27/04 15:16 ET