Strasbourg, 24/10/2002 (Agence Europe) - It was not very clear why the meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Strasbourg on Monday evening on the Benes Decrees was held behind closed doors, and several MEPs, including to co-president of the Green Group, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, protested against the situation. Professor Frowein spoke to the MEPs of the conclusions of his legal opinion on the decrees on the deportation of Sudeten Germans and Slovak Hungarians (see EUROPE of 5 October, p.5 and 23 October, p.17). CSU member of the EP Bernd Posselt, chair of the Association of Sudeten Germans, considered that it was a report of experts among others, that merely opens the debate on these "racist decrees, contrary to human rights". Austria's Ursula Stenzel (OVP) repeated that she did not understand how the law on amnesty could be applied in such an affair, that the wrong done to innocents had to be recognised and that the Czech Republic should create a compensation fund. For Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Czech Republic, Germany and Austria had to settle that between them, whereas, at European level, it was essentially a question of recalling that European unification was precisely intended to prevent such things happening again. Jurgen Schroeder, CDU member, spoke along the same lines, calling for the Czechs to be welcomed into the EU as soon as possible, "so as once and for all to prevent any nationalist harking back to resentments of long ago". The MEP of East German origin recalled that in 1995, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the destruction of Dresden, the then President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Roman Herzog, had called for tears to be shed for the victims, but without trying to settle the problem of guilt decades after the tragic events.