For the first time the summit of the Berlin Process will be held outside the borders of the European Union. The capital of Albania, Tirana, on October 16 will host six leaders of the Western Balkans and key EU leaders, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

A new agreement will be added to the initiative aimed at cooperation between the countries of the Western Balkans in the alignment with the European Union. The leaders of Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are expected to sign the agreement for the mutual recognition of four professions, which include surgeons, midwives and veterinarians, which will be added to the professions already are arranged for doctors, dentists and architects. Also, it will be aimed to have joint declarations for the facilitation of trade and transport, for the protection of the environment and partnership for the climate.

Present at the next summit of the Berlin Process, which will be held in Tirana, will be the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, who, in addition to the need for regional cooperation, will also mention the act of aggression of Serbia in his address in Kosovo on September 24, his adviser, Jeton Zulfaj, tells KosovaPress.

Zulfaj considers it necessary to discuss Serbia’s terrorist attack in Kosovo among regional and EU leaders, even though the focus of the Berlin Process summit will be on economic cooperation.

On the other hand, civil society is more skeptical about the concrete results of the Berlin Process summit.

The researcher in the Group for Legal and Political Studies (GLPS), Arbër Fetahu, tells KosovaPress that the act of Serbian aggression in Kosovo has violated the Berlin Process at this stage, as the region has entered an inflexible situation with many question marks.

However, he says that it is necessary for the Berlin Process to have more dynamics in the coming months.

For the preparation of the October 16 summit, the ministerial meeting of the foreign ministers of the Berlin Process was also held in Tirana on Friday.

At last year’s summit of the Berlin Process, three agreements were reached between the six countries of the Western Balkans, the one on the free movement of persons with identity cards between the countries of the Balkan region, the recognition of university degrees and the recognition of qualifications for three professions: doctors, dentists and architects.

Kosovo has ratified these three agreements in the Assembly, as well as other regional countries except Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has not ratified the agreement on freedom of movement with Kosovo.

The Berlin Process is a diplomatic initiative initiated by the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in August 2014, to give new impulses and accelerate the pace of the entry of the Western Balkans into the European Union.