On 14 April 2021, Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš in Riga and CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti in Geneva signed the agreement granting Latvia CERN Associate Member State status. The agreement meant that from 1 July 2021 Latvia would become an Associate Member State of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, gaining broader access to major particle physics projects, training programmes, technological cooperation and industrial procurement in one of the world’s most important scientific centres.

Latvia’s path to CERN Associate Membership built on earlier cooperation that began with the 2016 agreement on scientific and technical cooperation in high-energy particle physics. This step tied Latvia more closely to Europe’s major research infrastructure – the home of the Large Hadron Collider and technologies whose impact reaches beyond fundamental physics.