On October 8-10, the third round of bilateral meetings between Ukraine and the EU took place in Brussels as part of screening the Ukrainian legislation for compliance with the EU law. Screening is the process of assessing Ukrainian legislation for its compliance with the EU law in each of 33 negotiating chapters. It is a necessary stage of the EU accession negotiations.

Today’s screening session was particularly focused on the Economic Criteria chapter, part of the first Cluster – Fundamentals of the EU Accession Process.

“We have presented to our partners from the European Commission an assessment of Ukraine’s progress towards meeting the EU’s economic criteria, which will form the basis for future negotiations. This is a great work on the assessment of our challenges, which involved Ukrainian and international experts. We have presented our vision of further functioning of the market economy, Ukraine’s ability to integrate into the EU’s single market, attract investments, and implement structural reforms. All this lays the foundation for further work on approximation to the European legislation,” said Oleksii Sobolev, First Deputy Minister of Economy of Ukraine.

The screening session under the Economic Criteria chapter covered macroeconomic stability, functioning of commodity markets, financial market, labour market, education and innovation, physical capital and infrastructure quality, sectoral and corporate structure of the Ukrainian economy, economic integration with the EU and price competitiveness, fight against corruption.

The next round of bilateral meetings on Cluster 2 – Internal Market will take place on November 19.

For reference:

During bilateral meetings as part of the official screening process, the European Commission and the candidate country thoroughly compare the candidate country’s legislation, strategic framework, institutional structures and administrative capacities with the EU standards. This is the basis for development of the European Commission’s recommendations in each area of the negotiation process.

Based on the results of screening, the European Commission will prepare a report on the compliance of Ukrainian legislation with the EU law for each negotiation cluster. This document will finally clarify the level of compliance and further scope of work.