The Union for the Mediterranean: The zombie is alive!

How do you prove that a death-born child is alive? Well, you pre-select a Secretary General with Brussels experience and make five countries agree on him.

This is what according to Eurotribune has been happening at the zombie organisation known by its official name "Union for the Mediterranean", an organisation that doesn't even have a website yet (at least none known to me so far), which is an obvious signal in the 15th Muslim, 21st Christian, and 58th Jewish century (hope the figures are correct).

But apparently, Egypt, France, Spain, Tunisia, and Jordan, five countries out of 44, have agreed to nominate Ahmad Massadeh as candidate for the post of Secretary General of the Union. According to other news reports, this represents a consensus of all Union member states.

Mr Massedeh, a former minister, is the current Jordanian ambassador to the EU and NATO, and thus probably a person well known in Brussels - something important for an organisation with a majority of countries being either in the EU or in NATO.

However, seeing the speed with which the almost dead organisation has developed over the last 1 1/2 years, the main task of its Secretary General - if he will be appointed - will be to apply all life-prolonging measures necessary to keep the death man walking.

(found via alvaromillan on Twitter)

Merkel's coup: Uwe Corsepius will become the next Secretary General of the EU Council

According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the German Uwe Corsepius will become the next Secretary General of the Council of the European Union.

Corsepius, who was mentioned as a candidate among others, has been confirmed by the heads of state and government at the European Council meeting on Friday, following agreements made on 19 November as Jean Quatremer knows. He will take over from Pierre de Boissieu in 1 1/2 years, as Angela Merkel informed at a press conference after the summit on Friday.

(UPDATE:) The formal approval of this decision was made on 22 December 2009 by the Council meeting (see the press release that uses parts of this blog post). According to this decision, Corsepius will serve as Secretary General from 26 June 2011 until 30 June 2015.

Economist Uwe Corsepius is 49 years old and is the head of the European Policy Division in the German Chancellery - he is thus the EU advisor of Angela Merkel and was, inter alia, responsible the for negotiations ahead of the Berlin Declaration during the German EU Council Presidency that led to the Lisbon Treaty. Jan Seifert wrote about him at the time as being one of the "sherpas" of Angela Merkel (here's a photo of him at the time).

On the website of the German politics and history channel Phoenix it is noted that he started his career in the Chancellery under Helmut Kohl and climbed up in the hierarchy under Gerhard Schröder. In 2005, Merkel made him head of the EU division in the Chancellery.

Three weeks ago, several German online news magazines published a short portrait (produced by DPA) about him, in which he is quoted with the words: "I am no visionary.", which would fit into the choices made with van Rompuy and Ashton, but which fits much better for the job he will have to do at the Council.

Actually, it seems that, according to several sources like EurActiv, Corsepius was also a possible candidate for Ashton's job, but didn't get it - probably for balance reasons as we know how Ashton was chosen. Therefore it is mentioned in the Frankfurter Rundschau that despite the choice of Corsepius for Council Secretary General, Merkel might still demand that a German becomes head of the European Central Bank - a clear sign that she is showing muscles after renouncing to get one of the three top posts (filled with Barroso, van Rompuy, and Ashton).

The amount of background information on Corsepius on the net is limited, but interesting to note is that Cecilia Malmström, Swedish Minster for EU Affairs and candidate for the next EU Commission, mentions Corsepius first in an a blog post about a visit to Berlin in April of this year. Usually he is described as "descrete", or as a person having relevant influence in German EU politics, for example preventing advancements in the negoations around the new anti-discrimination directive, as ZEIT online notices. In the Financial Times Germany, he is described as having a "boyish" face, with moments of "dash" behaviour. His only direct international experience, according to the FT, was his work at the IMF in the early 90s.

All in all, the choice of a national high level bureaucrat like Corsepius instead of an EU insider like de Boissieu is another clear indicator of the "Coup des Etats" I have criticised recently - member states are trying to secure their influence in the EU by the choice of personalities to counterbalance the new provisions of the Lisbon Treaty.

PS.: And if there are doubts, I'd just like to say that this choice is as bad as any other choice made by national leaders to secure their individual interests instead of promoting the good for all European citizens. These posts should be distributed according to merit, not according to geography and power considerations.

(Updated: 17 Dec 09; 12:30; 23 Dec 09 17:30)

Thorbjørn Jagland new Secretary General of the Council of Europe

After long discussions, Thorbjørn Jagland has been elected Secretary General of the Council of Europe.

The dispute over the election of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe has been going on for a while, as I have covered in the past (here, here, and here).

Today, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a mainly consultative assembly of the international organisation, in which delegates from all 47 parliaments of the Council of Europe member states meet four times a year, has finally elected the former prime minister, foreign minister, and president of the Norwegian parliament, Thorbjørn Jagland (new photo) with 165 against 80 votes for Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz a former Polish prime minister (see the press release).

The election is not a too big surprise, but I still think that the election of a Norwegian for this post is a particularly good choice.

Since the main task of the Secretary General is to moderate between the 47 member states, including the 27 EU members and most other countries of the continent, including Russia and Georgia, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan, it is good that the SG is neither from an EU country nor from a country involved in conflicts with its neighbours or in serious human rights violations.

This is also of advantage for the relations between the Council of Europe and the EU, since the present Special Representative of the CoE to the European Union is former Norwegian ambassador to the Council of Europe Torbjørn Frøysnes - so the two might be able to work together in way that will strengthen the relations between both institutions.

Altogether, it was time that the Council of Europe finally got a new leadership - and I am glad that it is a profiled figure such as Mr Jagland who will be responsible for the most important human rights watchdog on the European continent.

Restructuring of the European Parliament secretariat

Klaus Welle, the new Secretary General of the European Parliament, has announced changes to the EP secretariat as well as a closer look to issues of information technology:

"An exchange of views took place with Mr WELLE, the new Secretary General of the EP [...] his first appearance in the BUDG Committee since his appointment, on 15 March 2009. The new Secretary General highlighted the main points of his program for reshuffling the Secretariat General of the EP. The main changes would concern the Personnel DG, which would be divided into three Directorates [until now there are two directorates; JF]. He underlined the importance of a better definition of the Staff Regulations and modernisation of the promotion, mobility and appointment procedures.

Mr WELLE stressed the increasing importance of infrastructures and concluded that a new Directorate was needed. The new Directorate would be given more tasks such as building maintenance. The collapse of the ceiling in Strasbourg revealed the need for staff specialised in maintenance, which is lacking among EP personnel.

Information Technologies was another central element of Mr WELLE's programme as Secretary General. He considered that this central issue of governance had hardly been discussed at a sufficiently high level over the last 10 years."

(Source: Report on the meeting of the European Parliament Committee on Budgets held in Brussels on 27 April 2009, made by the Council Secretariat for the member states)

Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe rejects shortlisting of candidates by the member states - updated (2x)

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has just rejected the shortlisting of only two candidates (see my previous post) for the post of the next Secretary General of the Council of Europe by the ambassadors sitting in the Committee of Ministers' Deputies (the organ representing the governments in the Council of Europe).

The parliamentarians deplore the reduction of choice which was done by the Committee of Ministers against the formal rules of procedure of the Council of Europe. Several said that reducing the list to two candidates representing socialist parties would reduce the political choice of the assembly.

Some even compared the action by the governments' side with the lack of democratic standards the Council of Europe is observing in its member states (see my Twitter coverage from this afternoon).

So with some ammendments and by only one vote against, the Parliamentary Assembly has adopted this draft resolution asking the Ministers' Deputies and the Committee of Ministers to present to them the full list with all four candidates.

Tonight at 7 p.m., the debate will most likely be continued in the Joint Committee, the body uniting representatives from the Parliamentary Assembly and the diplomats from the member states to discuss issues of joint concern.

But the reaction of PACE today was a clear slap in the face of the governments of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe, in procedural, political, and democratic terms.

Update: The press release on this matter sounds veeeery diplomatic...

Update 2 (01 May): I just learnt at Le Monde that Mr Van den Brande, on of the eliminated candidates, has been the favourite candidate of Russia and that the Russian Federation is thus not quite happy with the outcomes of vote in the Committee of Ministers' Deputies.

Parliamentary Assembly debates next Secretary General of the Council of Europe and celebrates the CoE's 60th anniversary

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Update (29. April 2009)

Parliamentary Assembly rejects shortlisting of only two candidates for the post of Secretary General by the governmental side.
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No, the Council of Europe is not the Council of the European Union, the Council of Europe is an independent international organisation with 47 member states from all over the European continent.

The Council of Europe is a European Union light, it is like the intelligent older brother who was expected to become the pride of the family, but the younger brother studied business, became rich (steel and coal business), was able to buy presents for everyone, and thus became the preferred child of the family. The older brother studied philosophy, he always had more true friends, wrote the better books, new the better answers and was respected among his colleagues and everyone who knew him personally.

This older brother, the Council of Europe celebrates its 60th anniversary this year.

This week, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) - a body that is similar to the Consultative Assembly, the predecessor of the European Parliament - meets for the second of four annual sessions. Parliamentarians from the 47 member states' parliaments discuss issues of relevance and urgency.

For sure, the anniversary of the Council of Europe plays an important role at this session. In his speech on these last 60 years - a history summarised in this video, Lluís Maria de Puig, the President of the Parliamentary Assembly, summarised the work of the Council of Europe like this:

"The Council of Europe is primarily a moral force. This force is exercised in manifold ways to the same end, through the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights which is celebrating its 50 years of existence this year, the Committee of Ministers representing the governments, the institution of the Commissioner for Human Rights, the Venice Commission and the European Youth Centre to name but a few, and of course through this Assembly which conveys the voice of 800 million Europeans via their elected representatives."

The important topics of this week will be the three urgent debates on

• the situation in Moldova;
  
• the non-ratification of Protocol 14 to the European Convention for Human Rights; and
  
• the election of the next Secretary General of the Council of Europe.
  

For frequent readers of this blog, the reason for the first topic is very clear (see for example here and here).

The second topic is an "old" history, ongoing for four years already: 46 out of 47 member states (and thus signatories to the European Convention for Human Rights (ECHR)) have signed and ratified Protocol 14 to the ECHR, for years already. Only Russia, which has signed it, refuses to ratify this Protocol that would change and ease the working procedures of the European Court of Human Rights, which is overloaded with cases and which needs better and quicker working methods to fulfil its functions. But since Russia would not benefit from more cases (against it) at the European Court for Human Rights, it is blocking the reform that can only enter into force after all 47 members have ratified the Protocol.

The third topic might have been unnoticed by most of you. This year, the Council of Europe will get a new Secretary General. The old one, Terry Davis, is not allowed to be re-elected, and so member states were asked to present candidates.

According to several sources (like this one and this one), there were four candidates (the deadline for submission of proposals was closed in March) of which, after an internal vote (unconfirmed results published here) at diplomatic level last week, only the first two have been shortlisted and will be proposed to the Assembly at its next session in June for a final vote.

The candidates are (and were):

• former Polish Prime Minister Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz;
  
• former Norwegian Prime Minister and President of the Parliament Thorbjorn Jagland;
  
• former Head of the Flanders Government (Belgium) and present president of the Committee of the Regions of the EU, Luc Van den Brande;
  
• Hungarian MP Mátyás Eörsi.
  

According to the final agenda, the debate on the next Secretary General will start on Wednesday at 3 p.m.; the debate on Moldova will follow this agenda item. Protocol 14 will be discussed on Thursday. The full sessions are broadcasted via livestream.

This seems to become an interesting week, which will include speeches by Mrs Tarja Halonen, President of Finland, and Mr José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, President of the Government of Spain.

So I have a pledge: I know that the Council of Europe is ignored by most and disregarded by some, but the topics it discusses and the range of country it covers, makes it one of the three main European organisations, besides the European Union and the OSCE, and I can only recommend noticing what is going on in its institutions, because the political impact might not always be visible - but in many cases, especially in eastern and south-eastern Europe, and whenever the Court of Human Rights issues a judgement, it plays a central role for the core values of this continent, especially regarding the protection of human rights.

I therefore wish you happy birthday, old brother Council of Europe, and good luck for the future!

(This is the 500th post of this blog. I think it is only consequent to dedicate it to a pan-European organisation older than the European Union, mother of the European flag and the European anthem, reaching out to almost all parts of this continent, and dedicated to the values that guide my personal, political, and professional work: Human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.)