TBILISI Tbilisi has expressed hope that "the European prospect for Georgia will be accepted" by the European Union at a planned Eastern Partnership summit on May 21-22.
“The main point for us is that important progress will be recorded from the point of view of the liberalization of the visa regime,” President Giorgi Margvelashvili, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili and parliamentary chairman David Usupashvili said in a letter to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, European Council President Donald Tusk and European Parliament President Martin Schulz.
Georgia hopes that the EU will introduce a visa-free regime for Georgia at the Eastern Partnership summit, to be held in Riga.
The Georgian leaders argued in their letter that the liberalization of the visa regime would demonstrate to the population of Abkhazia and South Ossetia benefits the two republics may gain if they return under Georgian sovereignty, and that it would give Eastern Partnership member countries extra motives for reforms.
Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine signed association agreements with the EU in Brussels on June 27, 2014.
