Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-19-Speech-3-198"
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"en.20031119.8.3-198"2
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"Mr President, President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner Verheugen, one can, if need be, always relate good and bad news on the topic of the Northern Dimension. The good news is that the Council and the Commission say the Northern Dimension is alive and well. The bad news is that nothing much is happening within its framework, except that Parliament, the Council and the Commission are vying with one another to try and extend and at the same time dilute the concept, so that soon it will surely cover the whole of the northern hemisphere.
In the region of the Baltic basin and northwestern Russia, however, there are things happening all the time in which the European Union should also be economically involved. The issue of maritime security, or non-security, is one of them. The Union is enlarging and in four months the border between Russia and the Union will have doubled in length. The agreement over Kaliningrad is in danger of becoming a major quarrel as no one seems to be telling Lithuania what is happening or if anything is happening at all. It was amusing to read in the minutes of the EU-Russia Summit about a fast-track feasibility study being made by the end of 2003. That is now six weeks away and the Lithuanians, at least according to what their former president said yesterday, know nothing about it. The northern gas pipeline is probably going to start being built within two or three years which is to go from the Arctic Ocean, past Finland and via the Baltic to Central Europe. Its route from the Arctic to the Baltic lacks infrastructure and it will also presumably pass through primal forest that needs protecting. The Russians will not manage alone in this.
A big fuss is made from time to time in the Union about the risks associated with nuclear waste and nuclear power stations in northwestern Russia. Within the framework of the TACIS programme, however, there is a substantial amount of unused resources set aside for nuclear safety projects – some EUR 180 million. Why, then, are these not used for cleaning up nuclear waste in the sea at Litsa Guba and Murmansk, by which I mean decommissioned nuclear submarine reactors and nuclear waste on the shoreline, or ensuring that the power stations at Sosnovibor and Kandalaksha are safe to use? The Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership, which is coordinated by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, is an excellent tool. It should also be used elsewhere than in just one project. The St Petersburg Southwestern Wastewater Treatment Plant is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to what is needed.
Ladies and gentlemen, the fact that the Northern dimension still remains on virtually only a verbal level is by no means the fault of the Community. I point the finger at Finland’s present and former governments, for example, for which cooperation in the neighbouring regions does not seem to have been or be worth the bother of initiating any powerful lobbying to spur the European Union into action."@en1
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