Brussels, 27/01/2005 (Agence Europe) - The list of members of the group to be set up to advise the European Commission about research into security (The European Security Research Advisory Board, ESRAB) has almost been finalised, but it will be some twenty days more before it can be officially approved by the College. Why has it taken so long to appoint a group of experts to advise the Commission? Partly because procedures to nominate people for this kind of body are more complex with approval by the College, but mainly because this is a sensitive area and some Member States took a long time to select their candidates and then because the negotiations were complicated to put together a list of between 45 and 50 names. The group will in fact be made up of two sub-groups, tasked with industrial technologies and requirements for equipment for users (security forces, civil security, fire-fighters etc) respectively. As the group will not meet until the proposals for the forthcoming framework programme of research are already in inter-service consultations, it will not be in a position to look at certain aspects of the specific programme or at participation rules (management of property rights, classified and confidential information).
Cooperation between the specific security programme and activities to be carried out by the new European Defence Agency will be overseen by the involvement of Bertrand de Cordoue with ESRAB.
Furthermore, despite a certain level of contact between NATO and the European Commission, cooperation between the two organisations in research matters remains highly sporadic. In the words of an EU official, these are “two worlds which have still to become aware of each other”. It is also true, however, that NATO has a very small budget (16 million EUR a year) with which it conducts essentially civil research, although part of this envelope also goes on security. The other big difference lies in the fact that NATO supports scientists individually, whereas the Commission tends to support projects and preparatory action in security matters is generally the domain of the defence industry. Although it is not very well developed, there is at least some informal cooperation between the European Commission and NATO on mobility grants for scientists. The Commission also spent 220,000 dollars on a satellite interconnection project of the scientific communities of the countries of the Caucasus and central Asia, led by NATO under the name “Virtual Silk Highway Patrol”.