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Home Newsroom News and press releases Establishing Registration procedures for RYCO Local Branch Offices, focus of OSCE-supported regional meeting in Podgorica
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Establishing Registration procedures for RYCO Local Branch Offices, focus of OSCE-supported regional meeting in Podgorica

15 October 2019
(l-r) Maryse Daviet, Head of OSCE Mission to Montenegro, Fatos Mustafa, RYCO Deputy Secretary General, Nikola Janović, Minister of Sports and Youth and Edin Koljenović, Head of the RYCO Local Branch Office in Montenegro opened a regional meeting on establishing registration procedures for local branch offices of the RYCO,Podgorica, 14 October 2019. (OSCE/Marina Živaljević) Photo details

A regional meeting on establishing registration procedures for local branch offices of the Regional Youth Co-operation Office (RYCO) was held on 14 October 2019 in Podgorica.

More than 20 representatives of the ministries of foreign affairs and sports/youth from Belgrade, Podgorica, Skopje, Sarajevo, and Pristina, together with representatives from RYCO attended.

The meeting concluded with a draft document that defined specific steps on how each local branch office could register as a legal entity.

Nikola Janović, Minister of Sports and Youth, said that today’s work is to improve the institutional and legal functioning of RYCO. “The Western Balkan countries understand the challenges young people face, and together we can contribute to their improvement. I believe that this meeting will help overcome some of the key challenges facing the regional office,” said Minister Janović.

The Head of the OSCE Mission to Montenegro Maryse Daviet said that the Mission is there to support further growth of RYCO. “The Mission has built a close partnership with the Montenegrin institutions and the RYCO branch office since RYCO initiation. We appreciate these partnerships,” said Daviet.

Fatos Mustafa, RYCO Deputy Secretary General, said that although there has been a lot of progress in the work of the Office, there are still challenges ahead. “While much has happened at the regional level, we still lack concrete procedures at the contracting party level, to ensure that what we are doing is not just ‘doing an activity and finishing it’, but a matter of building stronger and closer partnerships of our offices with contracting party-level partners, from Government institutions to other national and international stakeholders,” said Mustafa.

Edin Koljenović, Head of the RYCO Local Branch Office in Montenegro welcomed the participants saying he was pleased that Montenegro, after recent regional capacity building training, hosted RYCO’s event again.

RYCO was founded in 2016 at the Western Balkans Sixth Summit in Paris as an independent institutional mechanism to promote the spirit of reconciliation and co-operation among youth in the region through exchange programmes.