Chancellor of the Government Milda Dargužaitė met with the representatives of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to discuss Lithuania’s progress as regards the implementation of the OECD recommendations, as well as further tasks.

On 21 July, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Linas Linkevičius met with members of the OECD delegation led by the Director for Legal Affairs and the coordinator for Lithuania’s accession Nicola Bonucci. The meeting focused on important issues related to the country’s accession and further activities.

“The fact that the multinational ground-based air defence Exercise Tobruq Legacy 2017 is held in Lithuania shows that neither exercises of this kind nor deployment of strategic air defence systems in Lithuania is a taboo any longer. In case there is a need, these capabilities would be here in Lithuania. And today we are rehearsing acting alongside allies in case we need to,” Minister of National Defence Raimundas Karoblis underscored at Distinguished Visitors Day of the exercise.

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania, Linas Linkevičius, attended the Foreign Affairs Council of 17 July 2017 to take part in a debate on the EU Global Strategy on foreign and security policy, on North Korea, Libya, and migration.

The priorities of the Estonian Presidency of the EU Council of Ministers are being outlined to parliamentary committees by ministers in a series of meetings taking place in July.

The Seimas closed the prolonged 2nd regular (spring) session. Convening for the first sitting on 10 March 2017, the Seimas held 62 plenary sittings and adopted over 420 legal acts.

The Seimas approved the planned framework structure of the army to be implemented in 2018 alongside with the threshold number of soldiers and statutory public servants for 2018 and 2023. A total of 76 MPs voted in favour of the law, with no votes against and 1 abstention.

The Seimas adopted the amendments to the Law on Forestry, thereby abandoning the requirement to establish a specific number of forest enterprises. The Law stipulates that integrated forestry activities in state forests are carried out by forest enterprises. The previous law provided for 42 state forest enterprises.

On 5-6 July, Vilnius hosted the meetup between the Latvian, Estonian and Polish teams in charge of the implementation of the programme for the centennial celebration of the restoration of the state to discuss the progress in this regard as well as the potential for joint regional projects.

Yesterday the group of independent Cohesion Policy experts presented its final report for a simplified EU funds framework after 2020.