RIGA. March 29 (Interfax/BNS) - President George W. Bush has invited Latvian Prime Minister Indulis Emsis to attend the Monday ceremony for NATO enlargement in Washington, D.C.
During his visit to the United States, Emsis will hand over to Bush the Latvian ratification documents of the North Atlantic Treaty and on March 29, Latvia will officially become a NATO member.
Together with the prime ministers of six other new member- countries, Emsis will attend a Monday dinner hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Later the prime ministers will meet with Bush, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. presidential national security advisor Condoleezza Rice in the Oval Office of the White House.
After the meeting, the White House will host an event involving several thousand people.
It is a tradition that the ratification documents of a treaty are kept in the country where the treaty was signed. Since the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, the ratification documents for the new member-countries will be deposited at the U.S. State Department.
On February 26, the Latvian parliament ratified the treaty in its final reading by 77 votes against six with five abstentions.
All 19 NATO countries supported the admission of Latvia and six other new members. The process of ratifying the accession protocols by NATO parliaments began in March 2003. Canada was the first to ratify the protocols and France completed the process in February 2004.
On April 2, the flags of the new members - Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria - will be raised outside NATO headquarters in Brussels.