Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-04-Speech-1-139"
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"en.20000904.9.1-139"2
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"Mr President, I should like to say at the outset that I welcome without reservation Mr Imbeni's extremely constructive report. It is an excellent piece of work and both my colleague, Commissioner Nielson, and I are delighted by the arguments set out. We are delighted by the broad welcome which has been given to the Commission's communication on its assessment and future plans for the Community's humanitarian activities. Many congratulations to the honourable Member.
Humanitarian aid, as a number of honourable Members have said, is an extremely important facet of the European Union's external identity. I am the first to acknowledge that we have a great deal to do to improve our performance. But, it is also important that we should acknowledge the enormous amount of good that our help does, day-in day-out, often in extremely difficult circumstances, often in very difficult situations right across the world. Whatever the faults – and it is our responsibility to try to put them right – let me pay tribute to what has been achieved and is being achieved by European Union aid and by the generous support of Europe's taxpayers. We are the biggest providers of this humanitarian assistance in the world and it is important, occasionally, that we remember that.
We very much appreciate Parliament's support for the reforms we are seeking. Much of the strategy which honourable Members urge on us tallies, marches very closely, with what we anyway wanted to do. I would stress that however much we might all like to do more we have to focus our action, given the very limited human resources at our disposal, on getting right what we are trying to do already. In this context, the Commission has decided to focus ECHO's interventions based on a definition of the term "humanitarian" which is, in my judgement, generous and flexible but is not infinitely elastic. We believe it would be wrong to overload ECHO with an ever-growing number of tasks simply for reasons of administrative ease.
Both Commissioner Nielson and I want to help countries and peoples in emergencies. But we also want to help them out of emergencies so that they can stand on their own feet again as quickly as possible. We will address this through country strategies which bring together the various types of assistance, emergency, developmental and so on, as quickly as it is feasible to do so. That in my view is the best kind of assistance and it is the wisest use of our taxpayers' money.
Let me add that we do not intend to make ECHO into an operational department which delivers aid from contingency planning to distribution in the field. That is not, and never has been, where ECHO's strengths lie. Such an approach would be ineffective and it would detract from the many advantages of ECHO's partnership approach which allows it, as has been said, to make funds quickly available to those who need them most. The partnership approach also allows for real involvement of civil society at the outset of aid operations, and the value of that has been proven time and time again.
We will continue to choose partners on the basis of their efficiency and the availability of partners for the task in hand and bearing in mind, of course, their different comparative strengths and the roles they can play. The NGO sector is an extremely important channel, but the United Nations and the Red Cross movement are also valued partners. Thanks to this mixed approach to partnership when necessary, we will be able to send specific messages to the different political fora.
Mr Imbeni mentioned the important issue of visibility. That is important. We want Europe's voters and taxpayers to know what is being done with their money and in their name. We have planned a Eurobarometer survey to gauge the current levels of awareness of ECHO in Member States and on the basis of that survey, which of course we will want to discuss with the honourable Member and others, we will be able to develop appropriate ways of increasing the awareness to which the honourable Member referred.
The humanitarian aid we give will continue to be governed by the principles of impartiality and non-discrimination laid down in our regulation and accepted by the humanitarian community worldwide. It is an element of our external identity demonstrating that Europe can act worldwide with one voice and that it can make a difference on the ground. As the biggest single source of humanitarian aid funding worldwide, as I said earlier, the European Union has a responsibility to be not just the biggest in terms of quantity but the best in terms of delivery. That is our clear and ambitious goal.
I should like to end with just one reflection. I do not come entirely new to the debate on these issues. Over ten years ago I was the development minister in the country I know best, as we learn to say, and was responsible among other things for humanitarian assistance. What has most depressed me about the international scene over the years is that, in practice, our ability to deliver humanitarian relief rapidly in the most unpromising circumstances has increased a great deal more than our ability to prevent that humanitarian assistance being necessary in the first place. That raises serious political and environmental questions about issues such as humanitarian intervention which are going to dominate much of the foreign policy agenda in the years ahead. But in the meantime we must make what we do in terms of humanitarian aid more effective. The honourable Member's report will make a significant contribution to that ."@en1
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