New associate members

In accordance with a decision taken at the last EPTA Council meeting in Paris in September in Paris, the outgoing French presidency accepted the membership applications for two new associate EPTA members in December:

• SPIRAL, a TA research unit at the University of Liège having good contacts with the regional parliament of Wallonia, will respresent this Belgian region in EPTA. See here for more details.
• The Analytical Department of the second chamber of the Russian Parliament, the Council of the Federation, will represent Russia in EPTA. See here for more details.

In addition, the current Austrian presidency is establishing resp. reinforcing contacts with a number of TA units around the globe with links to their parliaments, among them from Mexico, Chile, Ukrania, India, Japan and South Korea. Representatives of these units will be invited to the Council meeting in Vienna as observers later this year, alongside with our colleagues from Portgual, Bulgaria, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.