Foreign Ministry presents awareness raising strategy on EU integration

The awareness raising strategy on EU integration is designed to correspondingly and systematically provide information about the EU, including the objectives that envisage possibilities of a more active involvement of the Moldovan citizens in the integration process, Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Integration Andrei Stratan said on February 4, while presenting the strategy, Info-Prim Neo reports. The strategy aims at establishing a political framework and a system for coordinating and disseminating the information about the relations between Moldova and the EU and about the progress made within the EU in general. This process will be a challenge owing to the double task set: to broader distribute information about the EU, on the one hand, and to provide information about Moldova to the European institutions, EU member states and European citizens, on the other hand, Stratan said. At the same time, the minister stressed the necessity of informing the population from the left bank of the Nistru about the European integration process. Additional implementation instruments will be needed to achieve this objective such as the active involvement of the civil society from the region and of the EU member states, the Moldovan Foreign Minister said. The separatist regime has a monopoly on mass media and uses all the anti-democratic instruments to restrict the free movement, manipulating thus the public opinion, Andrei Stratan said. The representative of the European Commission’s Delegation to Moldova Paolo Berizzi said that the awareness raising strategy on EU integration will be an important instrument for presenting and informing about the progress made and for explaining the necessity of this progress to the people and why should they follow this path. During the presentation of the strategy, there were highlighted the document’s objectives, the importance of internal and external communication, the necessity of opening more regional information centres.