alessio surian
04/05/2009 6:31 pm
Our position and suggested pledges to MEP candidates
A wide range of international stakeholders are demanding that the new Cotonou agreement should: - Foster a more reciprocal and sustained political dialogue (Article 8) and strengthen governance provisions to better respect the spirit of the partnership. - Better reflect trends towards increased regionalisation and pan-African development. The emergence of the regional groupings as a result of EPAs and the African Union has raised concerns there will be institutional duplication and overlap. Revision should seek to ensure that the roles ascribed to these new bodies are adjusted to fit those of the existing ACP-EU institutions - Strengthen national ACP Parliaments to make the Cotonou processes more democratic, boosting their capacity - and the capacity of other key institutions - to help them play an active role in the dialogue, programming, implementation, monitoring, review and control of the Agreement. - Establish a mechanism to strengthen monitoring, review, and enforcement in Cotonou. The mechanism might take the form of an ombudsman type of service (as in EU institutions) or an independent inspection panel (along the lines of those in the World Bank or the African Development Bank). - Exploit the opportunities on policy coherence provided by the Agreement which is currently hardly used. It provides for the ACP to “initiate” discussions and “request” consultation on matters of concern to the ACP Group or its member states relating to “the coherence of Community policies and their impact on the implementation of the Agreement.” - Apply principles of the Paris Agenda in practice (ownership, alignment, etc) and follow-up closely on how financial allocations, particularly in the facilities funded from the intra-ACP envelope, are handled.