Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-19-Speech-3-169"
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"en.20031119.7.3-169"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Council is working with the European Commission on developing a series of new initiatives addressed to the eastern and southern neighbours of the enlarged European Union within the framework of the ‘Wider Europe’ initiative. These initiatives, which will be taken forward alongside the existing instruments for relations with these countries, will be tailored to fit the specific circumstances of each country concerned.
Since the beginning of the year, and even more so during our six-month term of office, the Presidency has been actively following the development of the European Union's new strategic approach to its neighbours to the east and on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. I will, of course, leave it to the Commission to illustrate the potential of this initiative in greater detail; my own intention here is just to make some brief points.
On 11 March, the Commission adopted the communication to the Council and the European Parliament entitled ‘Wider Europe – Neighbourhood: a new framework for relations with our eastern and southern neighbours’, which describes the new series of neighbourhood policies that the enlarged European Union should adopt with the countries sharing its direct land and sea borders.
This is the new concept of a ‘ring of friends’ by which the Union offers, essentially, to share ‘everything but the institutions’. The communication also describes the possible measures that could be made available to neighbouring countries as incentives to adopt and apply the necessary reforms that would enable them to benefit from access to the European Union's internal market.
The new neighbourhood policy will be implemented through national and/or regional Action Plans adopted by the Council on the basis of a Commission proposal. These plans should contain specific objectives and benchmarks, in addition to an implementation timetable for the progressive application of the measures for participation in the internal market. This will enable the Union to assess the practical implementation of these measures periodically. To do this, it will apply an ongoing monitoring mechanism to verify whether the conditions are being fulfilled and to assess the progress made by each individual country towards achieving the objectives set by the new policy, as well as the effectiveness of the Community instruments. In the future, these Action Plans could become the main policy instruments for the Union’s external relations with these countries, and could eventually replace the common strategies adopted thus far.
On the basis of the work carried out by the Commission and the Council, as the rapporteur has reminded us clearly, these last few months of 2003 will be devoted to the preparation of the Action Plans. In January and February 2004, a series of exploratory consultations will be held with the interested countries, on the basis of which by the end of spring 2004 the Commission will finalise the draft Action Plans for submission to the Council for Ukraine, Moldova, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, and Israel.
The Action Plans that will be put to consultation with the third countries will include five elements: enhanced political cooperation, internal market, JHA cooperation, communication and environment networks and measures to facilitate people-to-people contacts.
One final point I would like to mention is that the forthcoming Ministerial Conference of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership in Naples on 2 and 3 December will provide an important opportunity to take forward and develop the consultations with our southern neighbours."@en1
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