Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-04-Speech-1-113"
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"en.20000904.7.1-113"2
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". – Mr President, I very much welcome the interest that Parliament has shown in the external service, in particular, Mr Galeote Quecedo's report. I want to assure Parliament that we will consider its recommendations very carefully.
I do not want to complicate procedures further, but again I am open-minded on the issue. We have made it absolutely clear to our delegations that they should regard themselves as working for the High Representative and for the other institutions of the European Union, both when it comes to reporting and when it comes to logistical issues.
On relations with the Member States, I wholeheartedly endorse the proposal for greater cooperation. This is already our policy and the discussions this weekend at Evian very much concentrated on how best we can achieve that in practice. In our 1998 communication on the external service, we made it clear that any Member State that wished to keep a presence in a third country without maintaining an embassy was welcome to use the Commission's delegations. This has already happened on two occasions: in Sierra Leone by Germany and in Burundi by Austria. There is already a considerable degree of cooperation between Member States' embassies and Commission delegations. There are regular meetings at all levels. Joint reports are produced, either at the request of headquarters, or on the initiative of heads of missions.
The Commission also supports and, when appropriate, seeks to participate in co-location projects where more than one Member State and/or the Commission agree to occupy premises jointly. We have a programme of secondment of Member States officials and diplomats to our delegations. There are ten in our delegations at the moment, with a few more due in the near future. The restriction on the development of this programme is not lack of will on our part – I want to make that clear – but to some extent a lack of resources and also a certain reluctance on the part of the Member States to respond to our invitation to second diplomats to the delegations.
I want to underline the importance of coordination. We have to cooperate better without finding ourselves in a situation in which everything we do is second-guessed, not just in Brussels, but in other countries as well.
All this discussion about coordination and about the future of the external service takes place against the backdrop of a treaty which talks about a common foreign and security policy, not a
foreign and security policy in a Union of fifteen Member States, each with its own foreign minister. I strongly suspect that we will have fifteen foreign ministers in the European Union for the foreseeable future. But what we have to do is make coordination and cooperation more effective, more meaningful and more professional.
A final plea. In welcoming this report and in promising active cooperation in following its recommendations I must stress that if the external service is to carry out the role which Parliament wants for it, it must have the resources to do so; that is, not just resources to place officials in third countries but also to ensure that they are properly trained, that they are equipped with the necessary information technology and that they have secure means of communication. Last and by no means least, it is very important that they are provided with adequate physical protection in what is an, often, very dangerous world.
I want to pay particular tribute to Mr Galeote Quecedo. He deserves considerable respect for the very professional and open-minded way in which he has carried out his work. I can say without any reservation that the Commission has benefited from the report and it is bound to make a permanent impression on the way we run our external service in the future.
It is already a subject in which we have been taking a keen interest. I left a special meeting of virtually all our heads of delegation in Brussels early today specifically to be here for this debate. When apologising for my early departure I was able to inform them of the close interest that Parliament takes in these matters. The fact that we called all our heads of delegation to Brussels at this time is a sign of our determination to give a firm lead to the external service and to provide it with the career structure and the leadership that it deserves and needs.
Members will have seen the communication on the development of the external service that was adopted by the Commission on 18 July. It recommends continuing to rebalance delegation staff between officials and local agents and continuing the regionalisation of our representation in a way that will free up 32 official posts immediately to be redeployed to delegations that need reinforcement. The communication updates the list of priorities for the opening of new delegations and offices. However, even though some of these are urgent priorities, our first concern must be to use available resources to reinforce some of our existing delegations. The communication also describes the measures we are taking to devolve authority from Brussels to delegations in the field, known in jargon as "deconcentration". This is closely linked to our efforts to reform our external assistance programmes.
The communication makes it clear that what it proposes is only a first step. We intend to continue and to ensure the best use of the resources we have at our disposal on the basis of an evaluation of the workload of each delegation. I want to make this point very clear because it is the backdrop to Mr Galeote Quecedo's report. If we get through our reform proposals and if they are supported by the budgetary authority, in the SCR and the Bureau d'assistance technique combined we will have fewer people managing our external programmes, though we will have more than at present in the SCR. But we will have fewer people in Brussels and more people in the field. That is the balance we should be striking: to have more of the work done on the ground in our delegations. We will be preparing a follow-up communication on the external services in the first half of next year.
Let me comment specifically on Mr Galeote Quecedo's report. It makes recommendations in three main areas: the training of officials assigned to external relations, the legal status of delegations and coordination with Member States. A number of the points raised by the resolution, for example on regionalisation and on the evaluation of our network of external representations, are already covered in our own communication. The report stresses the role of the Commission and its delegations in the Community's external activities and it is, of course, essential that the Commission's external service be able to continue to contribute properly.
The first step must be to develop the training of officials in the Commission who deal with external relations. I am delighted that the report puts so much informed stress on that point. We have already made good progress but we need to build on it very fast indeed, particularly given the deconcentration that I have talked about. We should try, as the report suggests, to benefit from the skills and experience of existing training institutions in the Member States. We are already in contact with many of them and we will seek to deepen that relationship.
Whether it is now time to set up a college of European diplomacy is something that we will have to look at very carefully with Parliament, the Council and others. We will certainly consider that proposal very carefully and it underlines the importance of training – language training, management training, all the other sorts of training that are essential in order to make our delivery of programmes and our representation overseas more effective.
On the legal status of delegations I should say that although delegations are formally delegations of the Commission they are under clear instructions to give all possible assistance to all the institutions of the European Union and indeed to Member States. I am not convinced of the need to formalise this state of affairs since it exists already."@en1
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