European Commission

Date: 21/03/1996

THE Commission, along with the World Bank, have announced they will go ahead with plans to hold a second donors' conference on 12-13 April in Brussels to raise funds for reconstruction efforts in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The aim is to obtain 1 billion ecu for this year's needs on top of the 500 million ecu raised last December, as well as winning promises from donors for future pledges for 1997. Organisers hope representatives from the US, Japan and Islamic countries will attend.

FOREIGN Affairs Commissioner Hans van den Broek, in Moscow this week, told the Russian authorities he believed the country needed an independent human rights institution. While praising Russia's democratic and political reforms, he said its practices still left something to be desired. Noting increased EU-Russian economic links, Van Den Broek also said the EU was ready to step up the dialogue to include exchanges of economic data. Currently, two-way trade quotas and tariffs are established on the basis of each side's belief in the other's figures. Exchanging real numbers would be a significant step forward in the construction of a working partnership.

LOME may live on, according to Development Commissioner João de Deus Pinheiro. Speaking to a joint parliamentary assembly of the Union and 70 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) nations linked to the EU by the Lomé Convention, Pinheiro said he would publish a Green Paper before the end of this year to launch a debate about the future of EU development cooperation.

THE EU is the undisputed world leader in humanitarian operations, according to a report published this week by the European Community Humanitarian Office. The volume of operations carried out by the Commission has grown six-fold since 1991, reaching 692 million ecu last year. EU aid reached its height in 1994, totalling 764 million ecu, largely due to crises in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia.

BERLIN and former East German Länder are likely to continue receiving aid granted to the Union's poorer regions, maintaining their eligiblity for Objective 1 status until 2005, Regional Policy Commissioner Monika Wulf-Mathies told Länder leaders who were in Brussels this week to meet Commission President Jacques Santer, Competition Commissioner Karel Van Miert and Wulf-Mathies.

DECLARING war against ozone-depleting substances, Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard said she would push for the “radical reduction and phase-out of the most powerful” of those substances, including methylbromide and HCFCs. The Commissioner was responding to news this week from the World Meteorological Organisation that the hole in the ozone layer over the northern hemisphere had reached record size.

THE Commission has approved the spending of 11.8 million ecu on projects to monitor the environment with satellites. The projects include analysing cloud patterns, ocean currents, snow cover, climate change and pollution on Europe's coasts.