People living in countries requiring a visa to enter the EU already got used to collecting tons of papers, visiting embassies and not knowing whether they will receive the visa in the end while waiting for passport. They learned how to live with such a situation. But sometimes, this situation can be even more complicated than one can imagine.
A few of our locals will not be present at Agora Skopje. Thus, they will not fulfill the Antenna Criteria, but not because they don’t want to send delegates or because they don’t have money to travel. “A few weeks ago, we were happy when the Ministry of Youth and Sport Affairs agreed to fund the travel of our participants to Skopje” – says Shushan Khachatryan, president of AEGEE-Yerevan. However, it appeared that the nearest embassy of Macedonia is located in Moscow, which will require around 300 Euro more travel costs in order to submit the documents personally at the embassy and, as always, it is unsure whether or not the visa will be granted. Travelling 1,800 kilometers to get visa – isn’t it too much?
The same situation applies for AEGEE-Tbilisi. Their members are obliged to go to Ankara -which is located 1,020 kilometers away from Tbilisi- only to submit their application at the embassy to obtain a Macedonian visa.
All efforts of both locals to convince the embassies to hand out a visa without travelling to the embassy in person failed for each and every applicant. As a result of this situation, a few AEGEE locals will be absent at the Agora and thus they are not able to fully contribute to the development of our organisation.
Maybe the Comité Directeur could consider better the visa issue when choosing a local for hosting the Autumn Agora? However, this question was considered thoroughly.
Maybe the Agora organisers could help out a little bit more when locals face such a complicated visa procedure?
Being an experienced AEGEE member herself, former Secretary General of AEGEE-Europe of Ukrainian origin Alla Resheten faced visa issues countless times. However, after some preparatory work she managed to avoid situations like Yerevan and Tbilisi are facing at this point. “2 years ago, AEGEE-Kyiv and AEGEE-Valletta have organised an exchange which took place in Malta. Unfortunately, we do not have a Maltese embassy in Ukraine and we needed to go to Moscow to apply for a visa. We had to apply, pay for our visa and come back after 14 days to receive the visa” – explains Alla. AEGEE-Valletta, informed about this situation, called the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Malta, which then arranged that AEGEE-Kyiv simply sent their documents to Moscow and received their passports with a visa within 5 days. This is a clear example of a situation where lots of problems were avoided after some efforts from the organisers.
Tina Kukhianidze: “I think it doesn’t matter that we are just 2 locals in this case, we still are a part of the Network and have the right to have maximum opportunities to attend statutory events. But for now, I feel there is no support from the Network in these terms”.
For this Agora, it is already too late to change the current situation. However, we can learn from this experience how to avoid similar problems in the future.
written by Olga Iatsyna, AEGEE Dnipropetrovsk
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