Brussels, 19/09/2000 (Agence Europe) - As briefly indicated in EUROPE, the General Affairs Council (GAC), which met on Monday under the chairmanship of French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, continued its work in the wake of the "Gymnich"-type meeting in Evian, concerning enhanced effectiveness of EU external action. At the close of the debate, the Presidency adopted the following timetable:
In the note forwarded to ministers, the Presidency considered that the following actions should be undertaken as a matter of priority:
1. Strengthening coordination between the Commission and Member States, namely by: a) consolidating and organising consultation on the ground between Commission delegations and diplomatic missions in the third countries for the programming and implementation of cooperation projects. The Presidency proposed that: - precise provisions be introduced to this end in the text of the provisions regulating the multiannual Community aid programmes, while ensuring flexible management procedures are safeguarded; - the Commission and the Member States undertake to work in a horizontal manner in favour of coordination on the ground for all external aid programmes; b) coordination should be improved at the central level through: - reflection on optimal use of the legal instrument of common strategy; - the annual policy debate of the GAC on external aid.
2. Taking advantage of the EU's overall effort and increasing its effectiveness, namely by: a) establishing the measure of this global effort by: - finalisation by the Presidency of a coordination procedure involving the Secretariat General of the Council and the Commission for the elaboration of "index countries" that summarise aid given by the EC and Member States to a given country in all its forms and assessing the importance of this aid compared to total aid received from outside this country; - establishment by the Commission of a: i) comprehensive document on intervention financed by the Community taking all instruments into account (including European Development Fund, EIB loans and macrofinancial aid); ii) "scoreboard" presenting, country by country, the situation of commitments and disbursements for different programmes financed by the Community and EDF budgets; b) improved management of Community aid, the Presidency having proposed in this respect: i) that the Commission illustrate these Commission aims in terms of improved management of programmes in response to the following questions: - Is strengthened personnel management envisaged? - What is the time limit set for improving credit commitments? - What is the effect of the proposal on automatic release? - What are the concrete measures for improving coordination on the ground? ii) implementation of a more rational Commission-Member State relationship in the programme management committees, with an effort for transparency on the part of the Commission (the right of evocation of projects being cited by way of example) accompanied by greater flexibility granted by the Member States in its management (for example, concerning the threshold for projects for which the decision is up to the Commission alone); iii) the adoption of a horizontal rule for automatic release of dormant commitments.
3. Annual policy debate on EU external action and, in particular, on Community aid and its effectiveness. The Presidency proposed that the first debate of this kind (second half of January 2001) revolving around the following four major topics: quantitative assessment of external aid, thanks to a comprehensive paper on aid, the "scoreboard" and the "country-files"; ii) qualitative assessment of improvements to the management of Community aid, thanks to the presentation of the initial reforms (staff, de-concentration, more rational relationship between the Member States and the Commission in management committees…) and their initial effects, observed or expected; iii) assessment of local and central coordination; iv) goals of policies to come, taking account of the EU's different external commitments.