Brussels 12/09/2012 (Agence Europe) - A summit of “5+5” group countries, consisting of five eastern Mediterranean (Union of the Arab Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania) and five European countries (Malta, Italy, France, Spain and Portugal) will take place on 5 October in Malta. It will focus on security and economic development in the context of the current upheavals occurring in the Euro-Mediterranean area.
Specialists in this area have explained that during this summit (the second of this kind), Egypt and Greece's accession, which has been requested on a number of occasions, will again be rejected. Eastern Mediterranean countries consider that it will be necessary to present their different specificities (which are far removed from the continued upheaval in the eastern area) and will be more focused on security and migration questions. The informal framework of the “5+5” group is greatly appreciated. The idea will therefore be to create a hard-core within the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), as a kind of lobby group of countries that have close historical links within an organisation that stretches as far as Finland and Jordan.
The first “5+5” group summit took place in Tunis in December 2003. The European Commission president at the time was Romano Prodi from Italy. The current president, José Manuel Barroso, will officially be invited, as will the Secretary General of the UfM, Fathallah Sijilmassi and his counterpart at the Union of the Maghreb, Habib Ben Yahia. In August, the deputy prime minister of Malta, the host country, Tonio Borg, had a meeting on the subject with the Secretary General of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Lamberto Zannier.
Agence Europe was informed that, “the meeting aimed to set out 'Malta summit' priorities on security issues”. (FB/trans/fl)