ESTABLISHMENT OF THE PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

As the last President of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in the Mediterranean (CSCM), French parliamentarian Rudy Salles considered that the end of the CSCM was also a beginning. The CSCM process “will indeed continue in what we hope is an improved form, as its successor, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean”.

The President of the Hellenic parliament, Mrs. Anna Psarouda-Benaki, emphasised efforts to establish a Euro-Mediterranean free trade zone and to resolve security issues that have emerged in recent years, stating that without a safe environment, it was inconceivable to expect the Mediterranean countries to develop and their peoples to prosper. She noted that security could not be imposed by “raising walls or by the threat of arms procurements, but that it arose from the will of the people and the cooperation of governments”.

In the view of Mr. Abdelwahed Radi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Morocco, “the future assembly will be, as the CSCM: a place of dialogue to make the Mediterranean a zone of peace and democracy, a place where the rule of law and respect for human rights prevail”, so that the peoples of the Mediterranean, who share a rich cultural and religious heritage and a tradition of trade, will be able to write a new page in their long and common history.

Mr. Radi recalled that “the IPU was the first organisation to open the debate on the role of parliamentarians in working for security and cooperation in the Mediterranean, in 1992, in Malaga, three years before the Barcelona process began”. Two more conferences followed: in La Valette, Malta, in 1995 and in Marseilles, France, in 2002.

The Vice-President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Mr. Claudio Azzolini, expressed his support for the establishment of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, hoping for “close cooperation with it”. Among the possible fields for cooperation between the two assemblies, he cited the fight against terrorism, cultural cooperation, migration, human rights and democracy.

In the Declaration adopted by consensus by the fourth CSCM, the participants stated that “The transformation of the CSCM process into an Assembly will give more stature to parliamentary diplomacy in the Mediterranean region. It will provide the Mediterranean region with a unique parliamentary forum of its own, unattached to any ongoing process, where the members of the Assembly will be able to draw up and examine their own agenda. It will enhance the participation of Mediterranean States, thus enabling them to proceed beyond conceptual analyses to the drawing up of recommendations and opinions on questions of direct concern to them and to the Mediterranean space”.

The inaugural session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean will be held in Jordan in the second half of 2005. The CSCM process took place with the participation of the Mediterranean coastal States - Albania, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Monaco, Morocco, Serbia and Monetenegro, Slovenia, Spain, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia and Turkey - and three States that do not border on the Mediterranean, but are directly linked to the region economically, politically and strategically: Jordan, Portugal and The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.