European Stability Initiative

EU Legislative Interests

We are NOT trying to change EU legislation. Our contacts with officials from EU institutions are very limited as we believe that for most of our policy proposals we first have to convince EU member states, so we focus on targeting them. Sometimes we do meet EU officials, mostly in the Commission, and more often than not, these meetings are on the initiative of EU officials. Our main fields of focus are: - asylum/migration/refugees (our focus: how to respond to illegal migration while protecting the UN Refugee Convention, how to address pushbacks at the EU's external borders) - EU enlargement process (our focus: a more credible offer from the EU, a better enlargement methodology) - the political and socio-economic situation and the role of the EU in all seven potential and official EU candidate countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey) - a response to the erosion of the rule of law in Poland and Hungary - the human rights situation in Europe with a focus on the Council of Europe and the role of courts such as the ECtHR and the EUCJ Our aim is to ensure that principled, fact-based arguments in defence of liberal democracy reach diverse audiences across the political spectrum. As part of this work, we continue to defend the idea of European integration against anti-EU narratives.

Communication Activities

We do not do opinion polls or surveys. What we do is to write policy papers which we disseminate electronically and which we present in meetings or at public or closed events to which we are invited. We rarely if ever organize events of our own, as we don't have the capacity to do this. We publish little. But this is not an impediment to have impact. In recent years our team has laid the foundation for the EU-Turkey statement and continues to be at the heart of asylum policy debates in key EU member states, pushing ideas how the EU-Turkey statement can be better implemented, how the atrocious conditions in Libya can be addressed and – more generally – how Europe can develop a humane, yet effective asylum policy. We have exposed "Caviar diplomacy", a scheme of the government of Azerbaijan to systematically corrupt MPs in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, leading to numerous resignations and some court convictions. (However, so far Azerbaijan as a country has escaped from any consequences.) We have examined the Polish government's efforts to subdue the Polish judiciary and called two times on the European Commission to start infringement procedures on new legislation incompatible with European standards and norms. We were happy to see this happen both times. We have consistently pushed for visa-free travel to the Schengen area, first for citizens of the Western Balkan countries, then also of neighbourhood countries. We continue these efforts for Kosovo and Turkey, whose citizens are the last Europeans not able to travel to most of Europe without visas. South East Europe, where we started our activities, has accompanied our work since our foundation 20 years ago, from preparations for the Thessaloniki Summit of 2003 and ideas for the reform of the accession process to our efforts to discredit the idea of border changes as a solution to Balkan minority problems. See our website at www.esiweb.org for our reports, newsletters, events, and media reporting on our work.

Interests Represented

Does not represent commercial interests

Member Of

We have no member organisations and are not a member of any organisations.

Organisation Members

We have no member organisations and are not a member of any organisations. As of 2026, our donors are the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the German Korte Stiftung, the Austrian ERSTE Stiftung. A full list of all past and current donors is at https://www.esiweb.org/donors