Res Communis

Czech Republic becomes EUMETSAT’s latest Member State

by Sara M. Langston with the blog faculty

From EUMETSAT:

EUMETSAT welcomed the Czech Republic as its 25th Member State as of 12 May 2010.

This followed completion of the ratification process by the Czech Republic, which also informed the Depository of the EUMETSAT Convention. Czech accession brings EUMETSAT one step closer to achieving its aim of mirroring the membership of the European Union.

As a Member State, the Czech Republic will participate fully in EUMETSAT’s decision-making process and its industry will be able to bid for contracts, in addition to maintaining the unlimited access to all EUMETSAT data and products for official duty use it has enjoyed since becoming a Cooperating State in March 2005.

EUMETSAT is proud of its long relationship with the Czech Republic. The organisation’s first cooperation agreement with a Central and Eastern European country was with the Czech and Slovak Hydrometeorological Service, signed in Prague in February 1992 when the process of creating separate Czech and Slovak states was already underway. The cooperation agreement allowed Czechoslovakia to use images and information from EUMETSAT’s Meteosat satellites but did not confer any other rights. The EUMETSAT Council approved the concept of a Cooperating State in June 1995. In 2005, the Czech Republic became a Cooperating State as an interim step towards becoming a full member of EUMETSAT.

The Czech Republic is already the seventh Cooperating State to become a full member, after Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Latvia and Poland. With the Czech accession, EUMETSAT now numbers 25 full Member States and six Cooperating States.