24 February General Affairs Council

Date: 27/02/1997

WITH the signatures of Yasser Arafat, Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van Mierlo and Commissioner Manuel Marín on a Euro-Mediterranean association agreement, the EU established ties with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Because the Palestinian Authority is not allowed to conduct foreign policy until it has negotiated its final status with Israel, the PLO will be the Union's official partner for the bilateral and multilateral ties within the Euro-Med process. EU foreign ministers also issued a joint statement with Arafat that established regular political dialogue. Before the meeting, the Council of Ministers said that dialogue would aim at promoting “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, and all that that implies”. Israeli diplomats criticised the accord, claiming that it contradicted the Israeli-Palestinian agreement that no country would establish ties with the Palestinians until their status as a nation or a territory was resolved.

SPAIN said it would block a plan to give South Africa partial membership of the Lomé Convention, which offers special trading privileges with the Union to 70 developing nations in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Spanish Foreign Minister Abel Matutes said he wanted to see improvements in relations between the EU and Pretoria before South Africa could reap any Lomé benefits, including preferential loans for development projects. Pretoria and the Commission are locked in tricky negotiations over a free trade agreement. South Africa wants better access to EU markets for its fruit, wine and vegetables - all products which Spain would rather see kept out. Spain also wants concessions from South Africa on a fisheries agreement which Pretoria is negotiating with the Union. South Africa appeared to have the support of other EU member states, whose foreign ministers said they would try to work out how to get the country into the Lomé Convention as quickly as possible. A conceivable date would be 24 April, during the joint EU-ACP ministerial meeting in Luxembourg.

GREECE also dug in its heels, over Cyprus, at the meeting. While 14 member states favoured EU accession for the whole of the island, reversing an old policy which stated that Cyprus' membership of the Union could be limited to its Greek part, Athens held out in favour of admission for Greek Cypriots only. Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van Mierlo said: “We are aiming at an agreement with the whole of Cyprus.” But Greek opposition to that idea meant that the Cypriot Foreign Minister Alecos Michaelides was not able to use his meeting with EU counterparts the following day to prepare for future membership talks.

FOREIGN ministers told the Commission to relaunch its talks with Canada and Russia on humane ways of trapping animals used in the fur trade. They said that draft agreements with both countries “leave room for improvement”, citing particularly the conventional steel-jawed leghold trap. The ministers want the Commission to negotiate trap standards, possible exemptions for indigenous trappers and the possibility of arbitration to reach a final agreement. By asking for further negotiations, EU foreign ministers supported a decision made last December by their environment counterparts to send the Commission back to the negotiating table, despite claims by Trade Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan that the deal he had struck was the best possible.

THE ministers did support Brittan, however, on the question of the American anti-Cuba Helms-Burton Act. They agreed that they would prefer to reach a settlement with Washington - something Brittan has been attempting to do in recent weeks - than to go through with an antagonistic dispute procedure at the World Trade Organisation. In a joint statement, ministers said they wanted to “continue to seek an overall bilateral settlement and in that case to halt or suspend the panel procedure”. They were not optimistic, however, that a settlement would be reached soon. Diplomats expressed regret at the deep differences remaining between the EU and the US on the subject. The Union has climbed down from its original insistence that the US law be abolished altogether, but the Clinton Administration has not yet offered a compromise.