Euro-Parliament hearing on Turkisk-Armenian border
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.
