Brussels, 24/08/2000 (Agence Europe) - The decision of the Secretary General of the Council/High Representative for Cfsp relating to "measures for the protection of classified information applicable to the General Secretariat of the Council" has just been published in the Official Journal (C 239 of 23 August). The 18-article decision, taken following an agreement reached on 27 July (see EUROPE of 28 July, p.3), introduces in the degrees of classification of documents treated by the Council the degree of "TRES SECRET/TOP SECRET", following the "political impetus" provided by the European Council of December 1999 in Helsinki to the "development of European Union assets for the military and non-military management of crises in the framework of a strengthened European security and defence policy". According to that decision, classified as TOP SECRET are information the unauthorised disclosure of which "could cause extremely serious prejudice to the essential interests of the Union or to one or more of its Member States". The other degrees of classification are SECRET, CONFIDENTIAL and RESTREINT, and detailed procedures are provided for for each type of document.
The decision indicates in particular that officials or other servants of the General secretariat of the Council shall "classify information on instruction from, or with the agreement of, their Directors-General", and sets out the conditions by which the documents must be drawn up (thus, information classified as TOP SECRET, SECRET or CONFIDENTIAL prepared by word processor shall be prepared on individual machines not connected to the normal computer network, and may in no case be stored in the memory of the machine)., the conditions for their transmission (for example, documents shall be distributed to each interpreters' booth just before the subject in question is discussed in the meeting room, and shall be recovered at the end of the meeting) and the conditions by which they shall be destroyed..
This measure, that is said only to concern 3% of the documents, is particularly important for the development of EU/NATO relations in the context of the European Security and Defence Policy (Esdp). You may recall that, in the talks that in July led to Javier Solana's decision, a certain number of countries (the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Denmark) had expressed their preference for maintaining the existing procedure for all Esdp documents.
In practice, following this decision adopted through the written procedure, the register of public documents of the Council accessible on the Internet (http: //ue.eu.int) will contain no reference to documents classified as TRES SECRET/TOP SECRET, SECRET or CONFIDENTIAL.