15^th Plenary Session of the Congress, 27-29 May 2008

Tuesday 27^th May

Speech of Mr Alan Meale, Chair of the Committee on the Environment, Agriculture and Local and Regional Affairs

ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY TO THE CONGRESS

Mr President,

Ladies and gentlemen,

I should first like to apologise to you on behalf of the President of the Parliamentary Assembly, Mr Lluís Maria de Puig, who is extremely sorry that he is unable to be here in the Assembly Chamber today. It is a great honour for me to speak to you on his behalf.

On behalf of the President of the Parliamentary Assembly, and in my own name, allow me first to congratulate Mr Halvdan Skard on his excellent presidency and to say how much we have appreciated the working relations established during his term of office. I should also like to congratulate the new president and tell him that he will of course be able to count on the Assembly’s support in pursuing the activities we are carrying out and the objectives we share. I wish him every success in this new task, which I am sure he will fulfil brilliantly.

I should also like to congratulate the Secretary General – and mainstay – of the Congress, Mr Ulrich Bohner, whose re-election is more than justified. We all appreciate his human as well as his professional qualities and are therefore delighted to be able to continue working with him.

All of us here, whether local elected representatives or parliamentarians, are the guardians and bearers of a universal message – namely the fact that our efforts aim to ensure that Europe’s citizens live in a world of peace, tolerance and social justice. This is a heavy task, impossible to perform without a collective effort, but I hope we can achieve this aim if we all work together in close co‑operation.

We in the Parliamentary Assembly are working tirelessly to secure respect for human rights: we have neither economic nor military power, but we do have another power of paramount importance – the power of human rights.

Without going too far back in time, we can see that since January European unity has been severely put to the test.

By way of example, I shall simply cite the Kosovo Assembly’s declaration of independence and the disagreements between members of the Council of Europe at the recent NATO Summit in Bucharest.

It is admittedly difficult to answer the many questions that have arisen, especially the question of whether we are not creating new dividing lines in Europe.

As you all know, the European continent is complex in many ways, in both cultural, historical and geopolitical terms, so we must bear in mind our primary aim of respect for human rights, which means respecting the citizens’ feelings.

That is where we come in, you at local level and we at parliamentary level: whether in the Assembly or in the Congress, our meetings, gatherings and discussions give us a chance to discuss all these issues together, on an equal footing, and then to make proposals which accommodate each body’s distinctive features. We hope those proposals will lead to a more promising future.

Europe has changed since our Organisation was set up. I believe that today, more than ever, Europe must face new challenges, whether economic globalisation, demographic change, climate change, energy or the new threats to our societies’ security.

To cope with these challenges, we must make a collective effort and develop our ties with all the stakeholders in European politics.

For my part, as President of the Parliamentary Assembly, I attach great importance to strengthening relations between the Congress and our Assembly.

Mr President,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let me now briefly put on my other hat, as Chair of the Committee on the Environment, Agriculture and Local and Regional Affairs. I would remind you that during the debate on the report on regionalisation in Europe – the rapporteur of which was our current President, Mr de Puig, who, as everybody knows, was a very active member of the Committee – the Assembly reiterated its intention to pursue co‑operation with the European regional institutions, especially the Congress and its Chamber of the Regions, in order to explore the considerable potential of regionalism for Europe in the future. It therefore supported the draft European Charter of Regional Democracy presented by Mr Jean‑Claude Van Cauwenberghe, whom I should like to thank and congratulate on his commitment. I am sure tomorrow’s debate on the subject will be most interesting.

In the same vein, the Parliamentary Assembly will soon be signing a co-operation agreement with the CALRE – the Conference of European Regional Legislative Assemblies. This agreement follows on from the first conference of national parliaments and European regional assemblies held jointly by the Committee on the Environment and the CALRE in Strasbourg last September.

The Parliamentary Assembly’s Committee on the Environment, Agriculture and Local and Regional Affairs has also just appointed two members to sit, with representatives of the Congress, on the stakeholders’ platform for implementation of the Council of Europe strategy on innovation and good governance at the local level.

As you know, when I took over as Chair of the Committee on the Environment in January, I proposed that we strengthen co‑operation with the Congress, especially with its committees working on topics of common interest, and that to that end we systematically invite a representative of the Congress to our committee meetings so that we can discuss issues and keep one another mutually informed of the different activities conducted in our two bodies.

Our Sub‑Committee on Local and Regional Democracy, whose Chair and some of whose members are here this week, takes an active part in much of your work. I hope this co‑operation will continue and will thus help us to uphold the Council of Europe’s values and principles together.

I wish you every success for your session. Thank you for your attention.