Brussels, 11/03/2008 (Agence Europe) - On 17-20 March the 15th Joint Parliamentary Assembly (JPA) of the ACP and EU will take place in Ljubljana. This political body brings together an equal number of MEPs and parliamentarians from ACP countries (Africa/Caribbean/Pacific) every six months (who are linked to Union through the Cotonou agreement). The situation in Kenya and Chad will dominate the current affairs debates, and will be the subject of emergency resolutions from the assembly co-chaired by Glenys Kinnock MEP (British Labour Party) and Wilkie Rassmussen, a parliamentarian from the Cook Islands. Janez Jansa, the prime minister of Slovenia, and Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament, will address the JPA at the opening session.
Negotiations on concluding economic partnership agreements (EPAs) between the EU and the six ACP regions will also take pride of place. The debate on this issue will not be subject to a resolution but should prove lively. Parliamentarians are expected to examine the follow-up to the concerns they expressed six months earlier in the Kigali declaration. This text called on the EU to ensure that at the end of the negotiations, no ACP country would be worse off than under the preferential Cotonou regime (see whole text in EUROPE/Documents 2472). MEPs will be able to question Louis Michel, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Development Aid, and Andres Ster, Secretary of State for Development in Slovenia, during question time at the Commission and Council. Neither Peter Mandelson, European Commissioner for Trade, nor Pascal Lamy, WTO Director General, both of whose presence was initially planned, will actually be taking part in the debate on these agreements that are supposed to put trade at the service of development.
The JPA will also adopt resolutions on the following subjects: - experiences gained from the European regional integration process applied to ACP countries (co-rapporteurs: Bornito De Sousa - Angolan parliamentarian, and Filip Andrzeij Kaczmarek - EPP-ED, Poland); - food safety in ACP countries (co-rapporteurs: Mohamed Ali, Ethiopian parliamentarian, and Alain Hutchinson - PES, Belgium); - social and environmental consequences from structural adjustment programmes (co-rapporteurs: Alma Oumarou -Niger, and Gay Mitchell -EPP-ED, Ireland).
Some of the many themes on the agenda for the debate are: climate change and its consequences to the health of ACP countries; sport for development and peace; the EU/Caribbean strategy; immigration; progress in ratification procedures for revised Cotonou agreement and the International Criminal Court. (A.N.)