Brussels, 12/03/2007 (Agence Europe) - The main themes to be tackled at the Commission's annual trilateral plenary session in Brussels on 17-19 March are: Europe's internal dynamic; security of energy supply; climate change; prospects for an open world trade system; the impact of countries from the emerging East Asian and Southern Asian community on world governance; the situation in the Middle East and transatlantic relations (particularly NATO). Participants will include: José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission; Peter Mandelson, the commissioner for trade; Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister; Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO secretary general; Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank and Adil Abd Mahdi, the Iraqi vice president. The session will be chaired by Peter Sutherland, former European commissioner for competition (1985-89), president of GATT at the WTO between 1993-95, currently president of the European Policy Centre, Goldman Sachs International, British Petroleum and the Trilateral's European section. He is also a member of the Bilderberg group steering committee, the non-executive director of the Royal Bank of Scotland and has just joined the energy and climate change experts' panel in charge of advising José Manuel Barroso.
The Trilateral Commission is a private organisation created in 1973 on the initiative of the main leaders from the Bilderberg group and Council on Foreign Relations, such as the three famous
Americans: millionaire and banker, David Rockefeller; diplomat, Henry Kissinger and political scientist, Zbigniew Brezinsky. It is made up of around 300-400 leading figures (business men, politicians, intellectuals from academia) from Western Europe, North America and “Pacific Asia”, more than half of whom will be coming to Brussels. It aims to promote political and economic cooperation between these three key zones in the world. The Trilateral is an organisation that openly works to promote globalisation and some observers say that it is responsible for orchestrating economic globalisation.
And to give credit where it's due, the work will begin on Saturday morning on 17 March with a session focusing on the host country, Belgium. Speakers will include Maurice Lippens, president of Fortis; Karel de Gucht, Belgian minister for foreign affairs; Jean-Luc Dehaene, former Belgian prime minister; Viscount Etienne Davignon, the vice-president of the Suez group and Karel Van Miert, former European commissioner for competition. The end of the morning session will focus on Europe's dynamic and will be guided by former European commissioner for competition, Mario Monti. Contributions by Jean-Claude Trichet; the president of Businesseurope, Ernest-Antoine Seillière, and the deputy secretary general of the European Confederation of Trade Unions, Reiner Hoffmann, have been programmed.
The afternoon session will mainly concentrate on the foreign policies and security of countries in the “Trilateral” zone of influence. The speaker programme is as follows: Henry Kissinger, the EU high representative for the CFSP Javier Solana, and the president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and former high commissioner for refugees at the UN, Ms Sadako Ogata.
In the morning of 18 March, the session will exclusively examine energy security and climate change. There will be a presentation by John Deutsch, senior lecturer at MIT responsible for the Trilateral's task force report, “Energy Security & Climate Change”. At lunch at the Hilton hotel, Peter Mandelson will be speaking about the future of an “open” world trade system. In the afternoon, participants will be looking at the role of world governance in the community emerging from East and South East Asian countries. Wu Jianmin, the president of China Foreign University; Han Sung-Joo, the former South Korean foreign affairs minister and Hitoshi Tanaka, the former Japanese deputy minister for foreign affairs will be speaking.
The plenary will end on Monday 19 March with a session on transatlantic relations and NATO. This will include a speech by the secretary general of the organisation, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and include an impact assessment session of changes to the political landscape in the Middle East and how they will affect Trilateral countries. Speeches by the Iraqi vice president, Adil Abd Mahdi and Prince Hassan of Jordan are also planned. (ol)