Τhe Working Group of the European Union Diplomatic Archives (EUDiA) has been meeting since 1987 (under the member-state that each time holds the Presidency of the EU Council) to pool knowledge and best practices for the conservation and consultation of national and/or European diplomatic documents. Until 2009 the Group was meeting under the name” Group of Directors of the Archives of the EU Ministries of Foreign Affairs”. In 2009 it took the name EUDiA and its logo was adopted. Greece organized plenary EUDiA meetings during its previous Presidencies of the EU Council, and more specifically in Athens (1994), on the island of Syros (2003), while it also presided over one of the first meetings in Brussels during the 1988 Greek Presidency.

Greece, through the Service of Diplomatic and Historical Archives of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has been one of the most active and supportive members of the Group. It actively participates and works on the completion of most of the EUDiA projects, all of them aiming at facilitating the access of European citizens to the Foreign Ministries’ archival material and also providing historical research with tools like special databases (like the Database of Sources on European Integration from the MFA Archives hosted at website of the EU Archives in Florence: http://apps.eui.eu/HAEU/MFAdb/Welcome.htm) and webpages (like the Blue Guide  to the Archives of Member States' Foreign Ministries and European Union institutions: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/2918959/blueguide_pdf_201404.pdf) etc.

This year the EUDiA plenary meeting under the Greek Presidency will be held at the Amphitheatre of the Acropolis Museum in Athens (a preparatory meeting took place in Brussels in March) on May 30th. The main subject of the meeting will be Enhancing the visibility of a common effort: presentation and promotion of common projects, in the framework of the efforts to publicize the results of the work of the MFA Archives and their common projects to a wider audience, by enhancing, among other things, EUDiA’s presence in social media.

The Greek Presidency of EUDiA believes that this meeting will have positive results and conclusions for the European citizens in the area of access to information and transparency.
For more information on EUDiA and its projects, you can visit its Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/EUDiA/261729697303789.