Strasbourg, 10/04/2002 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday the European Parliament adopted a resolution (345 to 101 with 61 abstentions) by Elmar Brok (CDU, President of the Foreign Affairs Committee on the current CFSD and EU-NATO relations, in which it repeats its support for the police operation in Bosnia Herzegovina. The resolution says that the costs of launching the operation should be borne by the CFSD budget as long as the EP is duly consulted under the budgetary procedure which foresees agreement between the two wings of the Budgetary Authority on a general flexibility instrument for funding civilian crisis management operations, notes the EP, also supporting the deployment of the Rapid Reaction Force in its first peacekeeping operation in Macedonia, taking over Amber Fox from NATO.
In a PES amendment the EP notes that in terms of the Association Agreement with NATO countries that are not in the EU, the first attempt to draft an agreement with Turkey took place outside the EU's decision-making procedures and counts on an overall EU-NATO agreement on the use of NATO's means and capabilities not damaging the EU's decision-making autonomy.
The EP calls on Member States' governments to give absolute priority in the defence purchasing to meeting the needs of the Rapid Reaction Force, focusing on the Petersberg type missions. The EP notes the importance of a strong, viable European arms industry concerned (amendment by Philippe Morillon for the EPP) about the considerable R&D investment that some Member States are planning to made in the US arms industry. The EP calls on the European Commission to publish an update of its 1997 plan for the arms industry, seeing the development and purchasing of the big A 400M plane by 8 countries as providing essential deployment capacity to ensure the full mobility of EU troops and regretted that not all EU governments had taken part. The EP again called for a European Arms Agency to be set up and called on the Council to create a systematic review and consultation procedure for national arms purchase agreements. The EP says that monitoring and limiting arms exports should fall under the CFDP and the EU' trade policy.
On an institutional level, the EP feels it is time to formalise the meetings of EU defence ministers, stressing Belgium's initiative to draw up a White Paper on European security in co-ordination with NATO, and called on the Spanish Presidency to make progress in this connection. The EP called for a redefinition of the Petersberg mission to cover the war against international terrorism (with a Greens amendment stipulating that this should not cover preventative strikes outside the EU) and for research to be commissioned into capacity requirements for managing civilian crises.