(BELGRADE) - Serbian leaders will press the EU to hasten the country's integration into the bloc, President Boris Tadic said Tuesday on the eve of their first visit to Brussels after Radovan Karadzic's arrest.

"It is very important that ... we go to Brussels and dissect what has been done and what should be done ... making a roadmap on how Serbia can become an EU member as soon as possible," Tadic said in an interview broadcast by B92 television.

"We cannot do without Europe and therefore all processes should be speeded up, including the implementation of the trade agreement," he said in reference to an accord on closer ties signed with the EU in April.

Along with Tadic, the delegation travelling to Brussels on Wednesday includes Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic, Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic and the deputy prime minister for EU integration, Bozidar Djelic.

It is the highest-ranking Serbian delegation to go to Brussels in recent years, and the first such trip there since a new West-leaning government came to power in Belgrade on July 7.

One of the first acts of the government was to order the arrest of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Karadzic, who was captured in the Serbian capital Belgrade in late July, 13 years after he was indicted for war crimes.

That was followed by a decision to reinstate Belgrade's ambassadors withdrawn from European capitals that have recognised the independence of the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo.

The Serbian government hopes to get European Union candidacy by early next year and to win full membership by 2014.

So far, it has only signed the EU's Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA), seen as a first step on the long road to membership.

"Our delegation's main argument (for faster EU integration) will certainly be the arrest of Radovan Karadzic," a Serbian source was quoted as telling the daily Blic on Tuesday.

Tadic alluded to this, saying that Serbia could no longer come in for criticism that it was stalling on cooperation with the UN court after having transferred Karadzic to The Hague.

Last month, Serbia's minister in charge of cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Rasim Ljajic, complained about Europe's response to Serbia's arrest of Karadzic, a condition for its EU integration.

"We have (had) a very cold attitude from many EU officials" about the Karadzic arrest as "many in the international community ... are ill-disposed to Serbia," Ljajic said in an interview with B92 television.

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