Lithuania should ratify Serbia's Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU in late June, Tanjug learned Friday from the country's parliament.

Lithuania is the only EU member country still to ratify the agreement after the Romanian Senate approved it Wednesday.

The SAA ratification is on the agenda of our spring session, which will take place in late June, but an exact date has not been set, said Rimantas Stankevicius, deputy head of the parliament's international relations department.
Stankevicius believes the ratification will be just a formality.

The media has speculated that, like Romania, Lithuania could delay the ratification due to some open issues in relations with Serbia.

Professor at the Belgrade Faculty of Political Sciences Predrag Simic noted Lithuania could hesitate until some problem issues are resolved, while Serbia's former ambassador to Germany Ognjen Pribicevic said Lithuania would not want to stand apart from other EU member countries.

In a statement for Tanjug, Simic said possible issues included the failed privatization of the BIP brewery which was sold to a Lithuanian company, and the competition between the Lithuanian and Serbian candidate for president of the UN General Assembly.

Pribicevic agreed that some "rather unfortunate" episodes in the last few years have led to Lithuania being the last EU country to ratify the SAA, but noted the Baltic state was not the kind of political and economic power that would allow itself to go in the opposite direction from the rest of the EU.

The SAA, an international agreement signed by Serbia and the EU on April 29, 2008, establishes the legal framework regulating the relations among the signatories in the areas of political dialogue; regional cooperation; free flow of goods, people, services and capital; judiciary and internal affairs; competition; financial cooperation; harmonization of laws, and other areas.

The SAA needs to be ratified by all EU member countries and the European Parliament before it can come into force. In the meantime,

The Interim Agreement on Trade And Trade-Related Matters is used.

The SAA was ratified by the Serbian National Assembly on September 9, 2008, and by the European Parliament on January 19, 2011.