Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-16-Speech-4-135"
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"en.20020516.5.4-135"2
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".
Mr President, we may not be many, but I am sure we are good! Commissioner Nielson, I believe we are in complete agreement on the need to forge an effective partnership between the European Union and the United Nations, especially in the fields of humanitarian affairs and development. This became evident in the debate and the vote we held in the Committee on Development and Cooperation, and I hope it will happen again now. Anything else would be incomprehensible, given the universally declared aims in these fields, especially the challenges and goals of the Millennium Declaration, and, at the same time, the glaring lack of coordination in putting them into practice and the obvious scarcity of resources available thus far.
It is a pity, however, that the Commission did not take an all-inclusive, integrated approach to this partnership right from the start and has left the questions of security, peacekeeping, conflict prevention and crisis management until a later date, all the more so since these aspects are known to be connected with the issues behind this communication. Even so, I think the general sense of the communication is positive, especially when the United Nations is taken as a basic reference and pillar for the pursuit of the Community’s aims and policies in these fields.
It is important, however, to go beyond the contradiction which is quite obvious today, in that, on the one hand the Member States play a major role in the United Nations, especially in terms of their financial contributions to its various activities and its budget or the large contribution made by the same Member States and the European Union itself to the various United Nations funds, whereas, on the other hand, they clearly both have relatively little political influence, particularly in the specialised agencies.
This situation must change, and it must be based on greater coordination among the Member States themselves and greater involvement by them and the European Union in the various stages of United Nations programmes. Above all, they also need to be more involved in the drawing-up of development strategies and in the planning and performance of activities to be carried out in this field. This will ensure that their respective impacts are optimised and more coherent.
With a view to achieving the stated aims of this partnership, the Commission Communication points out the need for administrative arrangements: the ongoing negotiations on the so-called ‘verification clause’, which would ensure there is sufficient information on the use of available Community funds, must be brought to a quick and satisfactory conclusion; the 1999 EC-UN framework agreement should be renegotiated with a view to changing to an approach oriented more directly towards co-financing operations, output-based budgeting, and upstream programme financing. We share these concerns and these positions, but we also stress that the pursuit of an effective partnership and the achievement of compatibility in structures and procedures must be promoted on three fronts: through strengthening strategic political dialogue in order to define policies and programmes; through strengthening cooperation on the ground in developing countries so as to ensure complementarity and coherence at an operational level; and through the creation of a stable financial framework, with consistent rules and principles in the two institutions, as well as the above-mentioned new framework agreement, of course.
As mentioned in the Commission Communication, however, the first step in this cooperation has to be selection of the most suitable partners within the United Nations system. It is equally essential, at Community level, to bring the processes of decentralisation and deconcentration of management and decision-making to a swift conclusion and to ensure that social movements and so-called civil society in general are democratically involved. We shall not get far if we do not put our own house in order first. Achieving practical results in our current reforms is therefore essential in this field too.
Finally, because of our commitment to this partnership and our desire to see it put into practice, we ask the Commission to keep us suitably and promptly informed of its progress, and, in particular, we suggest that the Commission should include specific information on its progress in its yearly report on cooperation policy."@en1
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