Parliament official: Georgia “embarking on EU membership path”

Maka Botchorishvili, the Chair of the European Integration Committee of the Georgian Parliament, on Monday said the country was “embarking on the path to European Union membership” following membership candidate status it received last month.

In her remarks at the Interparliamentary Conference on Urban Policies in the European Union, Botchorishvili described the development as a “truly historic moment”. 

For the success of the European integration process, which we have to go through together with other candidate countries, we need to work together in many directions. Enhancing political dialogue is essential not only with EU institutions, but also with the EU member states at different levels and on different topics”, she told the audience. 

The Parliament official noted Georgia, with its cities, was an “ancient country with a complex history, mixed and interesting architecture, modern requirements and new opportunities that open up in front of us”.

Numerous challenges that we have had to deal with throughout the last decades - conflicts, Russian aggression, energy or economic crises and natural cataclysms, definitely influenced our urban development”, she told the event.

“We managed to move forward toward modernisation and do our best to address the needs of our citizens, but we still need to do more to address modern challenges”, the official continued. 

Botchorishvili added matters of local importance could “not be solved only from a local perspective in modern times”, and further pointed out that technological development, globalisation, social or migration aspects were raising the need to have “broader” visions when addressing local issues.