Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka will meet his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Monday, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of signing the Czechoslovak-German good neighbourhood treaty, the Government Office announced yesterday.
Prague, March 29 (CTK) – Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka will meet his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Monday, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of signing the Czechoslovak-German good neighbourhood treaty, the Government Office announced today.
The heads of government will mainly discuss current EU issues and bilateral economic cooperation.
Sobotka will also meet new German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin.
Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD), Fico (Smer-Social Democracy, Smer-SD) and Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) will assess the results of the EU informal summit held in Rome last Saturday. They will also touch upon Brexit, which British PM Theresa May will announce today to launch a two-year process of talks about future relations between Britain and the EU.
Sobotka, Merkel and Fico are supposed to deal with migration to which the Czech Republic and Slovakia have a different approach than Germany as they reject the system of mandatory quotas for the redistribution of migrants across the EU.
The three heads of government will discuss EU issues with students from the three countries as well.
Their meeting will also mark the signing of the Czechoslovak-German good neighbourhood treaty that modified bilateral relations after the collapse of the communist regime in 1989 and the unification of Germany.
“Cross-border cooperation is one of the key priorities for the Czech Republic. At the same time, it creates space for the development of mutual trust. I am glad that together with Germany, we have succeeded in coping with our joint history and that we can serve as a significant model for other European countries,” Sobotka said on Czech-German relations.
The treaty on good neighbourhood and friendly cooperation between Czechoslovakia and Germany, signed on February 27, 1992, reflected new conditions of bilateral relations after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Germany pledged to support Czechoslovakia’s membership of the European Communities, the EU’s predecessor, and both countries agreed on regular consultations on various levels.
In January 1993, shortly after the treaty was signed, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Five years later, the treaty was followed up by the Czech-German Declaration, which also embedded the compensation of the Nazism victims. At the same time, the declaration stated that the two countries would not burden bilateral relations with controversial issues from the past and would focus on their future cooperation instead.
hol/dr/pv
