Strasbourg, 18/12/2001 (Agence Europe) - Last week Parliament adopted the report of Dutch Green MEP, Joost Lagendijk on the European Commission's Communication on conflict prevention. The European Parliament considers that this Communication "represents some significant progress", but regretted that it had not been tackled in the appropriate manner and had not resolved the issue of the division of policy into different "pillars", the difficulties encountered in establishing co-operation between Member States and the time-lag between the setting up of implementation of civil and military programmes. Parliament is therefore asking for the pillar-structure of the Treaty, which it considers as the cause of some "incoherence" in foreign policy, to be re-examined when institutional reform is next introduced. It affirmed that conflict prevention should be integrated into Union programmes and must become a "horizontal factor of all joint EU policies" (environment, trade, energy, etc.). It also asserted that in order for the Union to turn its goals into reality, it would need to increase the budget for actions taken externally. Parliament welcomed both the idea of a "conflict prevention culture", announced with the prevention of violent conflict programmed decided upon at Gothenburg and the Commission's desire to work closely with the Council to identify and control zones where conflict could break out.
In practical terms, Parliament is calling for the implementation of an "appropriate structure consisting of a non-military rapid deployment unit". This unit could select appropriately trained technicians and economists and send them to the most important areas in order to carry out hands-on prevention operations. A European Peace Corps, that Parliament has been calling for since 10 February 1999, could take responsibility for co-ordinating the training and deployment of civilian specialists. Parliament also stressed the necessity of setting up databases so that experts would be able to intervene in any crisis situation, and invited the EU to establish contacts with the Canadian government, which "provides a magnificent example with Candem".