Eight countries are waiting in the wings to join the European Union.

Bulgaria and Romania have signed accession treaties and are set to join in 2007 or 2008.
Croatia and Turkey started accession talks on 3 October 2005. Turkey could complete them in 10 years, Croatia in five.
The other four Balkan countries have been told they can join the EU one day, if they meet the criteria. These include democracy, the rule of law, a market economy and adherence to the EU's goals of political and economic union.

Candidates for EU membership

Pre-register now for the International Summer University Macedonia 2006

In the summer of 2006, the Academic Training Association (ATA) togetherwith the Universities of Skopje, Bitola, Tetovo and the SEE Universitywill organise the second International Summer University in Macedonia. It is not possible yet to apply for the Summer University, but you canpre-register now by entering your name and email address on www.academictraining.org We will then inform you by email as soon as theregistration procedure opens. The ISUM 2006 will offer 20 intensive 3-week courses in Law, Economics, Business Administration, Public Administration, Education Science andTeacher Training. Courses will be taught in English and successfulparticipants will receive an official ECTS-compatible "Summer University Certificate". Next to the academic courses, cool parties, weekendexcursions, field trips, sports tournaments, and debates will be organisedfor all participants!
Don't miss your chance for a great summer - visit www.academictraining.org and pre-register for the ISUM 2006 now!

Education, training and youth Grants and loans

Education and training programmes
Youth Programme
Promotion of Active European Citizenship

THE PROGRAMME OF CONFIDENCE-BUILDING MEASURES

The Programme of Confidence-building Measures (CBM) in civil society was established following the first Council of Europe Summit held in Vienna in 1993. The upsurge of problems concerning majority-minority relations in specific countries has revealed the need to back up legal standard-setting and intergovernmental co-operation by implementing specific initiatives in particular fields in close co-operation with the majority and minority communities concerned.
The CBM Programme is the only assistance and co-operation programme of the Council of Europe that provides subsidies to civil society projects. The Programme’s budget for projects is each year considerably increased by voluntary contributions from member States.
The CBM Programme is designed to improve tolerance and understanding between communities and to defuse possible tensions between different communities in order to break down the barriers that divide them, both within member or applicant States as well as across borders. The aim is to enable those concerned to engage in dialogue, to learn and to work together so as to share experiences and promote mutual knowledge and understanding.

To conclude, the scope of the CBM Programme’s philosophy and pilot projects goes well beyond the improvement of minority-majority relations. It represents a major contribution to the realisation of the Council of Europe’s values and standards and the Organisation’s political role in preventing the emergence of conflicts, fostering democratic stability and promoting European unity.

Secretariat contact:
Mr Max Gilbert
Fax +33 3 88 41 37 81
e-mail: confidence-building@coe.int

Round-table meeting "Balkans and EU"

A round-table meeting entitled "The Balkans and the European Union" will take place this weekend in Bucharest with participation of 10 countries from the region, including representatives of NGOs and foundations.The meeting will focus on regional co-operation, security-related issues, EU integration process, and EU's role in Kosovo status talks.The event was organized by the Project on Ethnic Relations (PER).The PER was founded in 1991 to encourage the peaceful resolution of conflicts in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation.

EU states lose grip on climate change targets

Further efforts are needed to tackle climate change, the UN has warned in a fresh report, with greenhouse gas emissions in many EU states rising instead of decreasing.The Bonn-based United Nations Climate Change secretariat in a report released on Thursday (17 November) warned that the western world is losing its grip on the climate change problem. UN researchers found that overall in the industrialised world, greenhouse gas emissions were down 5.9 percent in 2003 compared to the 1990 levels.But the UN report says a large part of the reductions were achieved in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, as heavily-polluting industry stemming from the communist era were shut down as these countries restructured their economies.Richard Kinley, acting head of the UN climate change body, said: "What we see is that the emissions from developed countries as a group have been stable in recent years and not decreased as they did in the early 1990s. Moreover, greenhouse gas projections indicate the possibility of emission growth by 2010.""It means that ensuring sustained and deeper emission reductions remains a challenge for developed countries," he added.The EU as a bloc achieved a reduction of 1.4 percent in emissions from 1990 to 2003, still far away from the minus 8 percent target in 2012 that the Europeans have set themselves in the framework of the international Kyoto protocol.Former communist new member states witnessed sizable reductions as dirty plants closed, with the largest cuts reported in Latvia (58%) and Lithuania (66%). However, most "old" member states have seen emissions increasing instead of decreasing. Eleven of the fifteen old member states have reported emissions going up instead of down since 1990, with huge increases seen in Spain (41.7%), Portugal (36.7%), Greece (25.8%), Ireland (25.6%), Finland (21.5%) and Austria (16.5%).Only Germany (-18.2%), France (-1.9%), the UK (-13%), Luxembourg (-16%) and Sweden (-2.3%) managed to cut emissions.Under a "burden sharing agreement" facilitated by an emission rights trading scheme, the EU has set targets for each member state in order for the bloc as a whole to reach the Kyoto targets.According to the agreement, some states like Portugal and Spain are allowed to increase their emissions, but not by the amounts the new UN report has recorded.
By Mark Beunderman

The importance of education

What is education ? Is it maybe a kind of a polite gentleman that softly puts fair-plays manners into greedy human beings ?(… This time the first glance over the topic is given to me by a short article from The Economist: how Europe fails its young, attacking the state-of-the-art of Europe’s higher education….)Definitely education is much more than gentlemen. It regards the fundamentals of a nation, an area or a macro-region, that could strive them to improvements, both cultural and economical.Will there be an European Education System ?I hope and I envisage a time when not only credits are changeable, as now, but when the entire system will move from the same political view: a common financial independence, a variegated degree of freedoms: to get funds, to choose his own research fields, to set up specific academic paths. To be updated and gain competitiveness.