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Members of the Community of Portuguese-Language Countries (CPLP) are “unanimous” in their desire to free up citizens’ movement between their countries and will take steps to publicise and implement agreements already in force that facilitate such movement, it was announced on Wednesday .
These are the main conclusions of a two-day meeting by the group of experts on mobility within the CPLP that met for the first time at the organisation’s Lisbon headquarters, attended by officials from the nine member states’ ministries of justice, internal administration and foreign affairs.
In comments to journalists after the meeting, the director of the department of migration and legal affairs of Brazil’s Ministry for External Relations, Paulo Roberto Soares Pacheco, said that there was “unanimity in the desire to move forward” on this issue.
Pacheco, who chaired the meeting as Brazil currently has the CPLP presidency, said that it had represented “an important step”, allowing as it did an exchange of information “about the implementation of the range of agreements that already exist on mobility” and an assessment “of the possibility of moving forward, of deepening those agreements.”
Member states agreed on the need “in a first step, to work towards the real implementation of the already existing agreements,” he said, noting that some of theses documents have not yet been ratified by all CPLP members and others “have not been fully implemented”.
In particular, the working group recommends “special attention to the full application of the Accord on Granting of Multiple Entry Visas for Certain Categories of People”, which covers businessmen and -women, liberal professionals, scientists, researchers, sportspeople, journalists and cultural agents and artists.
At the same time, the group recommended greater publicity for these agreements, because people in the various member states are not generally aware of them, said Pacheco.
The third recommendation is “to continue to study measures to deepen” mobility between CPLP countries.
“The final, desirable objective is free circulation”, said Pacheco, while acknowledging that this will not happen “in the short term”.
No target date was stipulated to take the steps recommended, he said.
Questions of security or Portugal’s membership of the European Union’s Schengen area – arguments used in the past to suggest that freer movement of CPLP citizens would be difficult – were not cited in the meetings, Pacheco said.
Pacheco welcomed the fact that the meeting had taken place at all, given that the group had been inactive for quite some time. It was now proposed that it meet annually, he said
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