The 30th General Assembly of the Association of Balkan and Southeast European News Agencies (ABNA-SE) organized by the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) which is being held in Bugras, Bulgaria brought the first decisions.

All member agencies approved the new status that regulates the issues of the organization, while ABNA-SE is also officially registered with a legal status with headquarters in Sofia, Bulgaria, thus following the example of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA).

The new president of ABNA-SE has been elected Aimilios Perdikaris of the Greek news agency ANA-MPA. With the new status, the host country of the next assembly is the country where the new president comes from. Thus, Greece will organize the 31st ABNA-SE Assembly to be held next year.

We recall that for one year the presidency was held by the news agency KosovaPress.

Kiril Valchev, director general of the Bulgarian news agency BTA, has been elected secretary general.

Skënder Krasniqi from KosovaPress (Kosovo), Aimilios Perdikaris from ANA-MPA (Greece) and Serdar Karagöz from Anadolu Agency (Turkey) were elected members of the ABNA-SE board.

At the same time, Turkey applied for the organization of the 32nd ABNA-SE Assembly in 2024.

In this Assembly, it was decided that in this Association, there should be only one member from Bosnia and Herzegovina, since with the new status, a country should have only one news agency.

Until now, two news agencies from Bosnia, FENA News, as well as the news agency from the Republic of Serbia, Srna, have been part of ABNA-SE. After the opening of discussions and arguments of both agencies, as well as the word of all other agencies, it was determined only for one.

Thus, FENA News will be the only agency from Bosnia that will be part of ABNA-SE, while Srna was excluded. All this with the unanimous vote of all member countries of ABNA-SE. Apart from KosovaPress representing Kosovo, the Albanian Telegraphic Agency (Albania), BTA (Bulgaria), HINA (Croatia), ANA-MPA (Greece), FENA (Bosnia), CNA (Cyprus), MIA (North Macedonia), Anadoly Agency (Turkey) AgerPress (Romania) and MINA (Montenegro) will be part of ABNA-SE.