Sara Barbieri and Jovan Bliznakovski took part in the last of the three workshops organized within the framework of the TRAIN Program 2013. The workshop was organized by DGAP – German Council on Foreign Relations in Brussels, between November 10-14th. Participants discussed the future of European Enlargement and the political situation in the Western Balkan countries with high officials at the European Commission, Parliament and Council of the European Union. In particular, they questioned the 2013 Enlargement Strategy and Progress Reports with Lawrence Meredith (Head of the Unit A1 Enlargement Strategy and Plan), Silvio Garzano, Marta Udina and Peter Baytay (Secretariat of European Parliament, Committee on Foreign Affairs), and with Zoltan Martinuz (Directorate C2, General Secretariat of the Council of European Union).
During the workshop, Sara Barbieri and Jovan Bliznakovski have presented the policy brief ‘Overcoming Ethnic-Based Segregation: How to Integrate Public Schools in Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina’ co-authored with Roska Vrgova of the Bosnian CSO ‘Zozto Ne?’. The brief was presented to the desk officers for Macedonia at DG Enlargement of the European Commission and to the European Parliament’s Working Group on the Western Balkans, chaired by MEP Eduard Kukan. The situation of school system in Macedonia and the problems connected with ethnic-based segregation in ‘mixed schools’ were discussed.
The policy brief will be broadly distributed at national and international level in the following months.
