Council of Europe's North-South Centre: integral reform, role and achievements
- Author(s):
- Parliamentary Assembly
- Origin
- See Doc. 7949, report of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Development, rapporteur : Mrs Durrieu. Text adopted by the Standing Committee, acting on behalf of the Assembly, on 7 November 1997.
- Thesaurus
1. The Assembly reaffirms Europe's commitment on behalf of developing countries. It calls for the closest possible dialogue between European countries and these countries. The Assembly, having been at the origin of the Council of Europe's North-South Centre established in 1990, intends to deepen this European commitment and emphasises the North-South Centre's contribution towards this goal since its creation.
2. The Assembly therefore welcomes the increase in the centre's membership from ten countries at the time of its creation to the current sixteen. It hopes that all remaining Council of Europe member and observer states will be able to join.
3. The Assembly counts on member states to grant resources to the centre that are in line with the tasks given to it, not least in order to reduce its sometimes excessive dependence on voluntary, outside funding, a situation which makes forward planning and implementation of projects more difficult. Such resources will be particularly needed to permit the centre to contribute to the Council of Europe's organisation of the second European campaign on North-South interdependence and solidarity in 1998, called for in the Assembly's
Recommendation 1319 (1997).
4. The Assembly believes that the centre, with its limited financial and staff resources, should further intensify the efforts which it has already undertaken to define priorities amongst its large number of projects, focusing on those which most closely conform to its statutory mission of "increasing public awareness of global interdependence issues, and to promote policies of solidarity in conformity with the aims and principles of the Council of Europe" and on those which, in the words of Assembly
Resolution 998 (1993), serve to counter "Europe's current rise in xenophobia and other tensions".
5. The Assembly in particular welcomes the more recent efforts of the centre to review its organisational structure, priorities and working methods in the interest of greater efficiency, and notes that these actions are largely in line with those advocated in Assembly
Resolution 998 (1993) on the Council of Europe's North-South Centre: role and achievements. More specifically, the Assembly :
5.1 welcomes the centre's efforts to improve the functioning of its "quadrilogue" structure, not least through a new emphasis on "regional quadrilogues", and asks it to envisage the possibility of radically rethinking and reforming this structure;
5.2 calls for a fair balance among the centre's main areas of activity ("windows") and more specifically that a greater share of resources go to the Public Information and Media Relations window and the Global Education and Youth windows;
5.3 asks that thought be given to the possibility of having the centre's consultative assembly meet less often than the current every two years, for budgetary reasons;
5.4 proposes that the role of the centre's programme advisory groups be kept under permanent review so as to ensure their cost-effectiveness and relevance to the centre's activities
5.5 encourages the centre to further improve co-ordination with other organisations involved in North-South co-operation so as to avoid any duplication of effort.
