LONDON: Leaders of six Western Balkan nations are due to meet British and European officials in London on Wednesday for talks on migration, security and economic growth in a volatile region where Russia seeks to wield influence.<\/p>\n
Delegations from Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia are attending a summit held as part of the Berlin Process, launched in 2014 to keep the southeastern European countries working toward European Union membership.<\/p>\n
The only Western Balkan nation to join the EU is Croatia, which became a member in 2013. Progress for the others has stalled, with countries at various stages of the journey, and in recent years tensions have flared between Serbia and Kosovo, a former Serbian province whose independence is not recognized by Belgrade.<\/p>\n
The EU\u2019s openness to accept new members has grown since Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There are concerns the war in Ukraine and Russia\u2019s deepening confrontation with the West could spill over into a region still scarred by its own conflicts.<\/p>\n
The UK is hosting the annual summit despite leaving the EU in 2020. It is also being attended by representatives of several European countries and the EU.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Keir Starmer\u2019s center-left government is hoping to make progress on tackling the drug trade, bolstering Western Balkan nations\u2019 defenses against interference from Moscow and \u2014 a particular British priority \u2014 curbing unauthorized migration.<\/p>\n
Gangs have smuggled hundreds of thousands of people to the EU via the Western Balkans in recent years, and Britain says a quarter of migrants reaching the UK in small boats across the English Channel have traveled through the region.<\/p>\n
Britain is hoping to build on a joint task force with Albania that has helped \u2014 through a returns agreement and local projects in areas the migrants come from \u2014 reduce the number of Albanian migrants trying to reach the UK, from 12,000 in 2022 to some 600 in 2024.<\/p>\n
Britain also has sent law enforcement officers to the region to work with the EU border agency, Frontex, and it is seeking countries willing to host \u201creturn hubs\u201d where rejected asylum-seekers could be held until they can be deported.<\/p>\n
The leaders of Albania and Montenegro both expressed reluctance to have return hubs on their soil.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes to the hubs, or whatever they are called, I\u2019ve said it, and I repeat \u2014 never in Albania,\u201d Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said Tuesday at the Chatham House think tank.<\/p>\n
Montenegro\u2019s Prime Minister Milojko Spajic said his country is \u201cnot part of the migrant routes through the Balkans\u201d because its railway infrastructure isn\u2019t developed enough.<\/p>\n
He said might be willing to accept a migrant returns hub if Britain agreed to \u201cinvest 10 billion euros into building railways.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON: Leaders of six Western Balkan nations are due to meet British and European officials in London on Wednesday for talks on migration, security and economic growth in a volatile region where Russia seeks to wield influence. Delegations from Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia are attending a summit held as part of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":88523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88509"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88525,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88509\/revisions\/88525"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}