28/02/2003

It’s the end of the road for the Eureka Audiovisual project. Following its meeting on 18 February 2003, the coordination committee, presided over by the Macedonian Minister for Culture, "ended the mission of Eureka and made the unanimous recommendation to bring the organisation’s mandate to an end on 30 June 2003. "
Set up in Paris on 2 October 1989, by the Ministers of the 26 European member states and following the European Audiovisual Assembley, Eureka Audiovisual was operational for 12 years as an pan-European intergovernmental organisation. Its main role consisted in supplying "the Great Europe’s" industry operators with the instruments they needed to facilitate their access to audiovisual markets. In recent years, the work of Eureka focused on central, southern and south-eastern Europe through the creation of networks and outsourcing joint ventures with the MEDIA Programme, the European Audiovisual Observatory and Eurimages.
Following the geopolitical changes that the audiovisual sector has experienced in recent years, the overwhelming majority of EU candidate states participate directly in this programme, thus limiting the range of a project like Eureka.
More recently, the withdrawal of a number of its members put both the organisation’s functionality and its viability at risk.
The press release issued by Eureka Audiovisual underlines the fact that certain central and south-eastern European countries are still a long way from being fully integrated and must therefore rely on pan-European “goodwill and solidarity” .

For ulterior information, check out the Mediadesk Belgio web site.