Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-11-16-Speech-2-066"
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"en.20041116.9.2-066"2
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".
Mr President, I will seek in the course of my remarks to answer very robustly on the Commission's behalf the point made by the honourable Member, and to make it clear why it views heading 7 as the correct one for this assistance. If the honourable Member can wait for a moment and listen to what I have to say, it may help inform him on any subsequent points of order he wishes to raise.
Let me now turn to the Commission's proposals for assisting Northern Cyprus, in the course of which I shall try to answer the point of order the honourable Member raised earlier. As the House is aware, the Council invited the Commission, after the failure of the referendum on the reunification of Cyprus in April 2004 – and I would like to wholly associate myself with everything that my colleague, Commissioner Verheugen, said about that – to bring forward comprehensive proposals to put an end to the isolation of the Turkish Cypriot community. On 7 July, the Commission duly adopted a comprehensive package of trade and aid measures, as requested by the Council. Although today we are only discussing the Rothe report on the financial instrument, I would like to stress again the political importance of the package, which aims at facilitating the reunification of Cyprus by means of financial assistance and trade under preferential conditions.
The proposal for a Council regulation establishing a legal instrument for encouraging the economic development of the Turkish Cypriot community creates a specific financial instrument for an amount of EUR 259 million, to be implemented from 2004 to 2009.
At this point I will explain to the honourable Member why it is we have argued that heading 7 is the correct heading for this assistance. The financial instrument aims to facilitate the reunification of Cyprus by encouraging economic development, with particular emphasis on the economic integration of the island through approximation and alignment with the acquis, mainly through TAIEX, and by improving contacts between the two communities and with the European Union. Most of the activities will therefore be similar to the pre-accession activities financed under heading 7, which appears to us to be the most suitable financial perspective heading for this particular assistance.
Priority will be given to investments in the field of infrastructure, transport – including links between the two communities – and environment projects such as waste disposal, sewerage and improvement of the water supply, water quality and the distribution system. Rural development, as well as measures concerning small and medium enterprises, will be another priority. Other objectives are social policy, labour market policies, vocational training and treatment of illegal immigrant workers, as well as reconciliation, confidence-building measures and bicommunal projects.
As regards implementation of the funds, different options have been carefully examined by the Commission. We finally propose that the Commission be enabled to entrust the European Agency for Reconstruction with the implementation of large infrastructure projects under this regulation, and amendment of the Agency Statute to this effect is considered in the Samuelsen report which we are also discussing here.
The Agency option is clearly the most suitable as regards economy, efficiency and effectiveness. It would allow the Commission to rapidly deliver assistance to the Turkish Cypriot community after the regulation is adopted.
The Commission welcomes Parliament's support for the financial instrument as expressed in the Rothe report on the proposal. Concerning the proposed amendments, I think the House is aware that these have already been discussed in depth in the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Budgets. The Commission is grateful for the proposals made by those committees and we can support the substance of the majority of them.
I would, however, also like to take this opportunity to underline that in our judgement it is regrettable that the Council has not yet been able to agree, after nearly four months of discussion, on the text of the financial instrument. Implementation of the assistance could start immediately after the adoption of the regulation and the Commission has already taken the necessary preparatory steps.
As for the solution to the Cyprus problem, the conditions still do not exist for a new international initiative. In my view the Annan Plan remains the only realistic basis for a comprehensive settlement. Concerning its possible role in any new process aimed at a settlement, the Commission remains ready to support efforts towards a settlement that would permit a reunified Cyprus to be fully integrated into the European Union.
I would like to cover both the question of the extension of the European Agency for Reconstruction's mandate until the end of 2006 and the question of the Commission's proposals for helping Northern Cyprus. There is a connection between the two and I will make that clear in my remarks.
I wish to start by paying tribute to the Agency and to Richard Zink for the splendid work done since 2000 to help Serbia-Montenegro, including Kosovo and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The Agency was set up to deliver aid fast and effectively to communities which were in urgent need of it. That is exactly what it has done. The independent external evaluation of the Reconstruction Agency has concluded that the Agency has done an excellent job in fulfilling its original mandate. If the House remembers, it was a Commission Task Force for Kosovo, established just after the end of the conflict in July 1999, that laid the basis for the establishment of the Agency in February 2000. Since then its key positions have been held by detached Commission officials with long experience in managing our assistance. The Agency's record of success is the basis for the Commission's proposal to maintain it in its present format until the end of 2006, when the current assistance programme for the Western Balkans – the CARDS programme – also expires.
On the strength of this positive evaluation, the Commission has not proposed any other substantive change to the Agency regulation as it stands. We have, however, given a great deal of attention to the amendments tabled by the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and in particular to the suggestion to submit a Commission report on the future of the Agency by June 2005.
I am sure the House will appreciate that the important debate on the new Community financial perspective for 2007-2013 will have an impact on how to deliver assistance to the Western Balkans. We therefore feel it realistic to set the end of 2005 rather than the middle of 2005 as a deadline. Also, as the committee has requested, and in order not to leave any doubt about the future of the Agency, we will ensure that any proposal to extend the Agency beyond 2006 should be made by the Commission by 31 March 2006 at the latest.
For formal reasons, we have not deemed it appropriate to accept as a legal requirement an obligation to report on the division of tasks between our delegations and the operational centres of the European Agency for Reconstruction. The existence in the same country of both the Agency and the delegations calls for close cooperation on the ground to ensure that our assistance effort is not dissipated in any way. We have made great efforts to ensure that any difficulties are addressed by making the necessary changes to administrative procedures. However, we will continue to be available to discuss with the Committee on Foreign Affairs any concrete issues that it thinks could hamper the Agency's work.
I would like to underline once again the very important job which the Agency has done. When I became a Commissioner in the autumn of 1999, there was considerable concern as to whether we would be able to deliver assistance sufficiently rapidly in the Western Balkans. The Agency did the job extremely well and I want to pay tribute again to all those who have been responsible for that.
In order not to jeopardise the effective performance and operations of the Agency in the Western Balkans, we have also found it sensible to go ahead with the original proposal to extend the time limit of the Agency's mandate and not to await the final outcome of the Council's discussions on the assistance package for the Northern Cyprus community and the extension of the geographical scope of the Agency.
Since the current mandate of the Agency expires at the end of next month, the positive opinion of Parliament today is essential so as not to interrupt our assistance to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and to Serbia and Montenegro, including Kosovo."@en1
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