EP Foreign Affairs Committee Voting on Serbia Report This Week

Tonino Picula (BETAPHOTO/MILOS MISKOV)

The European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) will vote on June 3 on a report on Serbia, in which rapporteur Tonino Picula has emphasized that the reforms needed in the EU accession process have been significantly slowed or are regressing, especially in the fields of rule of law and democracy.

The draft report, to which 531 amendments were submitted after its presentation to the EP, covers events from 2025 and those more recent, including the AFET mission in Serbia from Jan. 22-24, 2026.

EP rapporteur for Serbia Tonino Picula said while presenting the report at the AFET session on March 17 that the situation in Serbia has additionally deteriorated since the previous report, that it is “extremely polarized and full of tension while the overall tempo of association has been stagnating for years.”

Picula said that the reforms needed in the EU accession process have been significantly slowed or are backsliding, especially in the fields of rule of law and democracy, stressing that the policy of looking the other way and imposing stability as an alibi, by some European actors, has not yielded results but moved the country away from membership. He said that “the image of the media situation is appalling” and that elections cannot be fair without the implementation of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights' (ODIHR) recommendations.