Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-12-Speech-2-165"
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"en.20001212.8.2-165"2
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". – I very much welcome this report and I should like to pay tribute to Mr Oostlander for producing it. His report has been welcomed by all parts of Parliament except, perhaps by those who look back with nostalgia to the not-so-golden days memorialised by a very large number of brave Soviet dissidents. But it is an excellent report which, like the common strategy itself, underlines the importance that we attach to the relationship – the strategic partnership – between the European Union and Russia.
Just a word on Kaliningrad: the partnership and cooperation agreement already offers an institutional framework for our dialogue with Russia on trade, visa and border issues. At the same time the development of the region has already benefited from Tacis projects amounting to about EUR 30 million since 1991. We are now finalising a communication to the Council on Kaliningrad. We are in the process of opening an office in Kaliningrad. I very much hope to visit Kaliningrad myself in the early part of next year, and not just because Immanuel Kant spent the whole of his life there. It is a serious issue that we need to address as part of the Northern Dimension.
In all of the areas I have outlined we are working closely with Russia to our mutual benefit. We are working to strengthen Russian democracy, reinforce the rule of law and transform the Russian economy. That is all to the good, but there remains one serious impediment to further improvements in the ties between Russia and the European Union: I refer, of course, to Chechnya.
At the last European Union Russian Summit in October, President Putin acknowledged the urgent need for a political solution to the conflict. I have to say to honourable Members – and I will abbreviate what I might have said at much greater length – we are profoundly concerned about the humanitarian situation in Chechnya. We are concerned about the continuing reports of human rights abuses, for example from NGOs like Médecins sans Frontières and Human Rights Watch. We hope that we will be able to make a great deal more progress with the Russian authorities in addressing those issues in the months ahead. We are profoundly concerned about the likely fate of thousands of refugees in Ingushetiya and Chechnya this coming winter.
It is because we take our relationship with Russia so seriously that these issues matter. They cannot just be brushed under the carpet. We have to return to them again and again, but we must also continue, as the honourable gentleman's report wisely recognises, to engage with Russia. We must avoid the mistake to which an honourable gentleman referred earlier, which was made at the start of the last century, when Russia was effectively excluded from European affairs after the Leninist revolution in 1917 with disastrous consequences. We shall therefore persevere with the common strategy to build on the progress achieved to heed many of the points raised in the honourable gentleman's report, and above all to strengthen the hands of the Russian Federation.
Just one further word about a point that was raised by a couple of speakers in the debate – and that is the question of Georgia and visas. We have already expressed serious concern over the way in which Russia unilaterally introduced visa requirements for Georgian citizens on 5 December. The entire international community, not excluding Russia, is committed to supporting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the independent states. Actions by any country in the region which could have the effect of undermining that sovereignty carry significant implications. If more favourable visa requirements are applied to the inhabitants of secessionist regions or if they are exempted altogether, this would imply support for the legitimacy of their regimes.
Georgia is a member of the United Nations, a member of the OSCE, a member of the Council of Europe, and it has a partnership and cooperation agreement with the European Union. It deserves our support. We call upon the states of the region to use the OSCE mechanisms to resolve their disputes quickly before real damage can be caused.
I congratulate the honourable gentleman once again on an extremely good report on a very important issue, to which I am sure we will return in this Parliament over the next few years again and again. The honourable gentleman has given us a very important and useful political and intellectual infrastructure for our future discussions.
The report endorses what is being called our "double track strategy" towards Russia, a strategy that combines plain speaking on issues like Chechnya – to which I will return in a few moments – with a continuing effort to build an effective relationship based on shared values and cooperation.
The common strategy and Russia's medium-term strategy for relations with the EU have created a new dynamism. The common strategy identified initiatives in foreign policy, security and the fight against crime. Other areas where we seek to bolster European Union cooperative efforts towards Russia are the rule of law and democracy building, civil society, twinnings as well as regional and cross-border cooperation and, above all, the Northern Dimension Initiative, to which a number of Members referred.
We strongly support the Russian Government's economic reform programme which is vital to improve the investment climate. In this context, as Parliament will know, at the last summit between the European Union and Russia, Romano Prodi launched a far-reaching dialogue on energy.
These are all areas in which the Commission has a powerful contribution to make, as the report repeatedly makes clear. Our technical assistance programme – in particular Tacis – already responds to many of the priorities identified by this report. The core Tacis Programme, worth EUR 34 million, focuses on education, the rule of law, democracy and civil society development, including regional media freedom, protection of individual rights and support to self-government. The subsequent action programme – to a value of EUR 58 million – focuses on institution-building, on the rule of law in the economic field and on improvements to the business and investment climate.
The honourable Member's report rightly stresses the need for our Moscow delegation to play a bigger part in the management of our financial assistance, and I am determined to see significant progress in this direction as part of our wider reform of European Union external aid programmes.
The report comments on the Northern Dimension. We too see this as an important mechanism for regional cooperation for the development of the north-west Russian regions as well as Kaliningrad. I am anxious to work closely with the incoming Swedish presidency to make concrete progress on the Northern Dimension. This means concentrating our efforts on key areas like the environment – which has been referred to by a number of Members – and nuclear safety, on Kaliningrad itself and on improving coordination between different sources of funding.
We are acutely aware of the urgent need to tackle environmental threats from nuclear storage facilities and rusting decommissioned submarines, especially in the north-west part of Russia, for example, around the Kola Peninsula. This is a formidable task. It requires a combined international and Russian effort. The Commission has taken a leading role in the negotiation of an international agreement establishing the multilateral nuclear environment programme for Russia. Those negotiations are now at a key stage and we hope for significant progress by March 2001.
There is also a pressing need to raise environmental awareness in Russia. This is exactly the objective of the environmental work programme for the Russian Federation, initialled last June in the framework of our partnership and cooperation agreement."@en1
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