Antalya, 15/12/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Sunday 14 December in Antalya, Turkey, the sixth annual plenary session of the Euro-Mediterranean Assembly of the Local and Regional Authorities (ARLEM) began its work, with an assertion that dialogue between the two sides of the Mediterranean also involved a “regional dimension”.
This will clearly require bold decentralisation efforts to be made and work towards establishing “regional cohesion”. According to the general report submitted at the end of the Assembly's work for the year, this would also involve, “making progress towards a better balance between the different regions in a given country, to guarantee that the prospects provided people are not predetermined by where they live”, which explains the need for an effort to be made on migratory flows.
According to ARLEM, they needed to “acknowledge the regional dimension in development” that is also related to the fight for a healthy environment, particularly with regard to the question of waste management, which is a common concern of all the different local and regional authorities. A report on the subject was submitted to the session.
ARLEM will also examine a report on emigration. Michel Lebrun (Belgium), the president of the Committee of European regions and co-president of the organisation, underlined in this regard, the need to take into account this challenge, not only from a perspective of state responsibility but also within a perspective of the regional and local authorities in charge of organising reception facilities for arriving migrants. It would be both dangerous and insufficient if a migratory policy were developed without involving these local authorities, which should have both the “means and know-how needed to provide effective responses”, argued Lebrun.
He also pointed out that the challenge was a global one and underlined the fact that, “political instability in the Mediterranean region creates a permanent climate of violence leading to uncontrolled migratory flows, which created a real criminal immigration industry used by organised crime in Europe. If we wanted to have a minute's silence for all of the 3,500 immigrants who died in the Mediterranean in 2014, we would have to stay silent for three days”. Faced with these “political, security but also humanitarian challenges”, the different countries in the Mediterranean have to “reaffirm their unshakeable trust in Euro-Mediterranean cooperation, which is currently the only political and operational multilateral instrument that in this troubled period is likely to be able to build real sustainable socio-economic prospects for the region”. The regional dimension should be the clearest way to initiate this collective effort.
The Assembly also intends to put all its weight behind the promotion of regionalising policies, programmes and projects implemented with EU support, particularly in the context of “neighbourhood policy” and the specific ENI instrument that has more than €15 billion for the 2014-2020 period. The method will include “differentiation” and the recommendation to focus some of the ENI funding bilaterally granted on a “voluntary basis” for implementing the “macro-regions”, similarly to the way in which this was created in the Baltic region.
ARLEM is proposing to develop a similar strategy and create three macro-regions in the Adriatic-Ionian and Eastern Mediterranean parts (despite the difficulty of involving Israel) and in the western Mediterranean, by grouping each of these regions from the two sides of the Mediterranean together. This approach would gradually be introduced through a “2020 regional agenda”. Last June, in an effort to back this initiative up, ARLEM developed and updated a map outlining decentralisation and regionalisation accomplishments on the Committee of the Regions' website, which provides an insight into the legislation in force and the framework of local authority action in each of these countries. This idea seeks to create “a regional observatory” to analyse data from this map and to develop a comparative examination of the degree of decentralisation achieved by each of the countries in this region.
The Assembly is expected to debate these themes until the session is closed. It is also expected to reshuffle the co-presidencies. The Palestinian mayor of Beit Sahour, Hani Abdelmasih Al Hayek, is expected to take over from the Mayor of Gizeh (Egypt). The choice of a Palestinian (despite the fact that the local authorities in this zone are clashing with the increasing numbers of Israeli settlements), obviously has a political character but without denying this, President Lebrun has sent the subject onto the careful hands of European diplomats. (FB)