Brussels, 21/04/2006 (Agence Europe) - President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso has been invited to Tokyo on Friday, where he will be joined by the Austrian Chancellor and current EU Council President Wolfgang Schüssel to take part in the 15th EU-Japan Summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Monday. International security (Iran; Iraq, Middle East and Afghanistan) and security in the Asia-Pacific regions with China and Russia, and six-party talks on the North Korea nuclear issue), energy issues and WTO negotiations will be the main topics on the agenda for the Summit, at which External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner and the High Representative for the CFSP Javier Solana will also take part. Among international issues, Japan would like particularly to discuss the Iranian nuclear situation, where Japan is playing the role of mediator and to remind the EU of its very strong opposition to raising the embargo on arms to China. “We would like to be sure that the EU fully understands our security concerns over a possible military imbalance if it resumes deliveries to the Chinese army,” a spokesman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry told AFP.
In energy and combating climate change, both European and Japanese want to cooperate on the preparation of the multilateral regime to combat global warming to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.
The 15th Summit will, more generally, be an opportunity to “develop the strategic partnership between the EU and Japan,” underlined Mr Barroso before he left. In the fields of Customs cooperation and scientific and technological cooperation, the Commission hopes to strengthen the joint action plan whose four aims are the promotion of international peace and security, the consolidation of bilateral trade, how to respond to global challenges (notably in energy and combating climate change) and bringing peoples and cultures closer together. The Commission stresses, in a press release, that among recent progress on the joint action plan feature the 2004 adoption of the investment framework to promote the growth of direct bilateral investment, joint participation in the ITER scientific project and the signing of the agreement between Euratom and Japan this year. Finally, leaders present at the Summit will be informed of the conclusions of the EU-Japan Symposium on bilateral cooperation in Brussels on 6 and 7 April at which more that 130 representatives from academia, business, journalism and NGOs, and European and Japanese officials took part.
Amnesty International denounces death penalty in Japan
On the eve of the Tokyo Summit, Amnesty International has called on the European Union to get Japan to abolish the death penalty. “Japan is one of the few industrialised countries which continues to practise the death penalty,” says Amnesty in a press release, pointing out, “A number of people have been sentenced to death in Japan for crimes they did not commit, on account of a system which relies on pre-trial 'confessions' that are sometimes extracted by coercion”. “Hangings are only announced after they have occurred so that vigils cannot take place and public debate is minimised. Sometimes even the prisoner is not notified of the execution,” it says, denouncing too the prison conditions of those condemned to death.