37th Plenary Session of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly

St Petersburg, Russian Federation 17 May 2012

Speech by Keith Whitmore, President Congress of Local and Regional Authorities

Council of Europe

Madam President,

Distinguished members of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly,

Excellencies,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great honour for me to address you today on behalf of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe.

This year marks an important milestone in the history of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States – its 20^th anniversary. On behalf of the Council of Europe Congress, I would like to extend our congratulations to you and your Assembly on this remarkable occasion. I also would like to convey my congratulations to Mr Aleksey SERGEYEV [ser-GAY-ev] on his recent appointment as Secretary General, and to wish him every success in this new position.

This is a good occasion to recall that the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, which was founded during the crucial historic period of tremendous political, economic and social transformations in the post-Soviet space, has played a major role in guiding the transition of the CIS member States to a new system of governance, based on political and economic pluralism. This Assembly has been playing a unifying role as a platform for co-operation in harmonising national legislations and legislative processes within the CIS, and in ensuring their coherence.  In the Council of Europe and its Congress, we welcome in particular this Assembly’s approach of including European legal standards into its model laws, adapted to the conditions of the Commonwealth. We also welcome the Assembly’s growing role in establishing a common approach to social policy, respect for human rights and joint action in the humanitarian sphere.

Over the past twenty years, this consultative body has established an impressive record of achievements in a wide range of areas of common concern to its members as well as to the Council of Europe and its Congress. We believe that the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly’s active participation in the integration processes across the CIS has been a very important contributing factor to creating a unified space of co-operation for democratic development.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Congress itself is an assembly of 636 elected politicians representing more than

200 000 local and regional communities of 47 European countries.

Much as the work of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, the work of the Congress is driven by the need to develop close co-operation between representatives elected by the people at all levels of governance, co-operation across our entire continent – and, in your case, the vast Eurasian space – in order to improve the quality of life of our citizens. For 55 years, the Congress and its predecessors have been working to ensure the decentralisation of power to regional and local level in Europe, and to strengthen democracy at the very grassroots. Our mission has been to empower our communities – European towns, cities and regions – so that local and regional authorities could take up the challenges of today’s societies together with national governments and parliaments, and participate in finding common responses to these challenges.

Today, these challenges are plenty, against the background of the global economic and financial crisis, against the background of the need to develop a new democratic model in Europe, based on genuine citizen participation – a model for participatory democracy. This is why in November last year, the Ministers responsible for local and regional government from 47 member states of the Council of Europe agreed an Agenda in common – a roster of areas where national governments and local and regional authorities should join their efforts for maximum impact of their action. Among these are common and coherent responses to the economic crisis, measures to enhance citizen participation and to promote human rights at local and regional level as well as multi-level governance and cross-border co-operation. In addition, such areas as fight against corruption, and better application of the principles of local and regional democracy laid down in the European Charter of Local Self-Government, also represent great potential for joint action.

National parliaments have a crucial role to play in finding common responses to these challenges – including through pan-European and pan-Eurasian co-operation. Our missions coincide because we all share a common objective of improving the well-being of our citizens, which represents a basis for co-operation and synergies between us. It is therefore only natural that the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly has entered into a co-operation agreement with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe since 1997, and signed, in 2009, an agreement with our Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, providing for regular consultations and exchanges of information on issues of mutual interest.

Together, we can meet the challenges facing our societies today. Together, we can offer our citizens a better quality of life in their communities.

Once again, I congratulate the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly on its 20^th anniversary and wish this institution to carry on for the next 20 years with as much vigour and energy in building a common Eurasian space of democratic values.

Thank you.