Brussels, 11/04/2013 (Agence Europe) - The 9th plenary session of the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly (EMPA-UfM) will take place on Friday 12 April at the European Parliament. For the past year, the latter has held the presidency but will now pass this responsibility over to the president of the Jordanian parliament, Saed Hayel-Srour, for one year. Friday's short session, preceded the day before by committee meetings, will allow reports to be adopted on matters political, economic and cultural, environmental and energy, as well as on the situation of women. Martin Schulz, the outgoing president, will take stock of what has been achieved during his tenure, and his successor will set out the next programme.
Presidencies change every year between the four members of the EMPA Bureau (EU, Jordan, Portugal and finally, in 2015, Morocco). The Bureau itself changes every four years but the seat of the European Parliament within that body is the only one to be permanent. All EU countries (except the United Kingdom which clearly contested the Assembly from the outset) are members, in addition to a series of European countries that do not belong to the EU (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Monaco and Montenegro). The countries of the southern rim, including Palestine and Israel, are also members but are not generally very active in an assembly that was hitherto dominated by the omnipresent Egypt, now replaced by Morocco and, to a lesser extent, by Jordan. The others play a passive, more symbolic, role. Recurrent, heated debates - according to many present - are held regularly on the issue of Palestine, without producing significant results and often mirroring the positions defended “en bloc” by the European Parliament delegation regardless of political colour. One well remembers the Gaza invasion episode (Operation Cast Lead), when the APEM (as it was known at the time) took a great deal of time to react to such a central event for the region given that no consensus could be reached.
The Assembly born of the transformation, in October 1998, of the European Mediterranean Parliamentary Forum is a joint body, even if its working is essentially based on the European Parliament, within which an ad hoc secretariat has been set up. The question of human and budgetary resources is regularly raised, without concrete results being reached, in order to bring the Assembly out of its relative passiveness accentuated by the upheavals that have occurred in the southern rim since 2011. It essentially remains an empty shell despite the efforts deployed this year by the president-in-office - for example, at the recent meeting in Marseilles when an effort was made to give it greater “visibility”, albeit in a problematical context. The absence of the French president, François Hollande, who was to deliver strong announcements regarding Euro-Mediterranean commitment, meant that the effect of the meeting was weakened. Furthermore, the lack of progress in a Union for the Mediterranean without effective projects leaves the scene dominated more by rhetoric than by results, except in constructive dialogue between the regional authorities under the aegis of the EU Committee of the Regions and between the economic and social players and civil societies, for which the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) puts itself forward as the standard bearer. (FB/transl.jl)