Paris, 19 June, 2006 – The WEU Assembly has called for European Parliament (EP) representatives to be given full speaking and voting rights in the Assembly, and for collective parliamentary consultations to be stepped up with European decision-makers.

Two reports, adopted unanimously by the Assembly on Monday, called for the WEU presidential committee to “envisage inviting the chairmen of the defence committees of the national parliaments and a delegations of the subcommittee on security and defence of the European Parliament to become ex-officio members of the Assembly with full speaking and voting rights.”

Presenting a report, entitled ‘New Challenges for a Common European Foreign, Security and Defence Policy—reply to the annual report of the Council’ and drawn up for the political committee, Lord Tomlinson (UK/Soc) referred to the Assembly’s “empty seat for the European Parliament,” and said that the invitation to fill it might be “the triumph of hope over reasonable expectation.” But he added that the Assembly should no longer “just sit back (and) complain that non-one takes us seriously,” and should instead act to obtain the cooperation and coordination it needs.

Presenting another report, entitled ‘Relations between the Assembly of WEU and the European Parliament,’ this time for the Parliamentary and Public Relations Committee, Soledad Becerril (Spain/Fed), noted that the EP “would like to see us lose power partially or completely, but we say we can exercise oversight” on European security and defence.

Speaking from the floor, Robert Walter (UK/Con) also reflected a strategy to forge links with the EP rather than allow it to encroach on Assembly territory. Although the WEU Assembly was the only parliamentary body with the “competence, authority and legality” to exercise European defence scrutiny, in reality the EP was trying to squeeze it out, he suggested. For example, the EP received an in camera briefing on the 1,500 EU troops being sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We must show vigilance,” he added.

In a wide-ranging recommendation in the first report, the Assembly welcomed the EU-3 and UN Security Council agreement on new proposals for resuming negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme, and said it approved the EU decision to suspend talks on an association agreement with Serbia until the fugitive generals accused of war crimes, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, were captured and delivered to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

The Assembly hoped the EU mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (EUFOR DR Congo) would stabilise the country after years of brutal war, and added that it was concerned about the “continuing disastrous humanitarian situation” in Sudan’s Darfur province and about Russia’s “difficult relations” with Georgia and other neighbours.