EURO-PARLIAMENT HEARING ON TURKISH-ARMENIAN BORDER
Mathieu Briens at TEPSA, mathieu.briens@tepsa.be

http://www.insideeurope.o rg/index.php?id=393&backPID=393&tt_news=20 4
s.do

8/11/07

TEPSA, Brussels. On 7 November in Brussels, on the occasion of a
meeting of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee and the European
Parliament Delegation to the EU-Armenia Parliamentary Cooperation
Committee, two authors of TEPSA’s study on "The case for opening the
Turkish-Armenian border", presented the results of their work to the
Members of the European Parliament.

This was the first meeting of the two delegations, and was held in
preparation for possible parliamentary initiatives in support of
opening the border and normalising relations between the Republics
of Armenia and Turkey. The meeting was convened and chaired by
Delegation Chairpersons Marie-Anne Isler Beguin (EU-Armenia PCC)
and Joost Lagendijk (EU-Turkey JPC).

After a presentation of the main findings of the study, Burcu
Gultekin-Punsmann, Research Fellow at the Center for European Studies
at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and Nicolas
Tavitian, Director of the Inside Europe resource centre, answered
the questions of the Parliamentarians. The quality of their work was
acknowledged by the Chairperson of the meeting Marie-Anne Isler-Beguin,
who welcomed it as a contribution to raising awareness on this
sensitive issue, as well as opening new perspectives for discussion.

The study, which was delivered as part of the framework contract
between the Trans-European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) and
the European Parliament, was coordinated by Nathalie Tocci of TEPSA’s
Italian member Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) in Rome.