The National Platform of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum has called on the Belarusan government to ensure that the foreign minister or a higher-ranking official represents Belarus at the forthcoming Eastern Partnership Summit.

Last month, Lithuanian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrius Krivas handed an invitation to attend the Summit to be held in Vilnius in late November to Vladimir Drazhin, the Belarusan ambassador to Lithuania. The invitation is addressed to the country in general rather than to specific people.

In a resolution adopted at a conference in Minsk on Monday, the Belarusan National Platform says that representation by a top-ranking official is necessary to ensure the expediency of Belarus' further participation in the Eastern Partnership program and a genuinely multi-vector foreign policy.

The resolution describes the existence of political prisoners in Belarus as serious foreign-policy problem and calls for their unconditional release before the Eastern Partnership Summit.

The National Platform warns that Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan are taking no steps toward Europe and may be sidelined by the other post-Soviet countries involved in the program, namely, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, and that Belarus' poor performance within the framework of the Eastern Partnership may increase its international isolation.

The resolution calls on the European Union to make every effort to deal with the conflict between the development of the Eastern Partnership and the planned establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union.

The Belarusan National Platform of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum was founded in July 2010 to coordinate civil society organizations' efforts to democratize the country and bring it closer to European standards of democracy and human rights. Ulad Vialichka, leader of International Consortium “EuroBelarus”, currently chairs the Belarusan National Platform.

BelaPAN