Prime Minister Gaston Browne is hoping Antigua and Barbuda would be able to persuade the European Union, through negotiations, not to implement its decision to discontinue visa-free access to holders of the country’s passports.
The prime minister made known his preference during a courtesy call by two members of the European Union’s delegation attending this week’s 55th Regular Session of the Organisation of American States (OAS) General Assembly being hosted by the Antigua and Barbuda government.
“We recognize that the European Union has agreed to certain protocol’s now to discontinue visa-free access. We are hoping, though, that through our negotiations that we can come to some ‘happy medium’ in which we can maintain the visa-free access but at the same time providing the EU with all of the assurances that our programmes do not represent a risk to the European Union. As you are aware, the programmes are very important to the OECS countries. In fact, even more so to the other OECS countries than Antigua and Barbuda because in our case, it’s about 10 percent of overall revenues, but for the other islands, it’s up to 50 to 60 percent,” he observed.
He underscored the importance of the CIP programmes to the OECS states noting that should they be forced out of operation, then the results would be ‘devastating’.
“As you know, we have a consultative mechanism in which we are cooperating with the North Americans and the Europeans to strengthen our programmes,” he stated.
PM Browne revealed that the government is going to parliament next month to make the recommended changes citing this as an example of full cooperation ‘on the sense that these programmes are very important to us’.
The prime minister added that if the European Union feels that it must introduce new measures, then these would not go beyond ETA’s.
“I mean, an ETA does give the EU some level of control in the sense that you know who is coming into your country and you can accept or deny. But as it stands now, we enjoy duty free access and we are appreciative of it, and we think that it is important to continue the visa-free access,” PM Browne urged.
