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WEDNESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2001 __________ Members present: Donald Anderson, in the Chair __________ Memorandum submitted by the FCO Examination of Witnesses THE RT HON JACK STRAW, a Member of the House, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, MR STEPHEN WRIGHT, CMG, Deputy Under-Secretary of State, MR KIM DARROCH, Director, European Union, and MR MARK LYALL GRANT, Director, Africa, examined. Chairman
(Mr Straw) I do not accept the assumption behind your question at all. We all went into the Abuja negotiations with our eyes open. The crucial thing that I said, once the Abuja text had been agreed in the hotel in Abuja, was that we would judge its effectiveness by whether it was put into action, not by the words on paper. If you are asking me were those negotiations worthwhile, yes, they were very important and they remain very important. (Mr Straw) Let me deal with why they were important and then I will deal with what was in President Mugabe's mind. They were important in two respects. First, in breaking out of the parody that President Mugabe and the others in Zanu PF had tried to erect that what he was involved in was a bilateral dispute between the old colonial, imperialist power, the United Kingdom, and the former colony, once Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and that all the problems which had faced Zimbabwe to an increasing degree over the last 20 years could be placed at our door step. We changed that from it being seen as a bilateral dispute to being a multilateral dispute, critically, one in which South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, along with Jamaica and then Australia, Canada and ourselves were involved. Secondly, we laid down in the Abuja text a clear framework for judging whether progress was going to be made in Zimbabwe following it and for judging the behaviour of the Zanu PF Mugabe government. Both of those are very important. Do I believe that Abuja has been followed? No. I said exactly that in the House last Tuesday in parliamentary questions. There is little in the Abuja text that has been followed. What has happened as a result of Abuja however is that international pressure on a multilateral basis on Zimbabwe has intensified and I do not believe that that would have happened without Abuja. To cast my mind back to June/July, there was hesitation in inside the European Union as to whether action should be taken under the Cotonou Agreement to move from Article 8 to Article 96. Indeed, although we thought there was a good case for moving straight to Article 96, that was not a general view and it was agreed therefore to give the Zimbabweans another few months. The result of Abuja and what has not happened since then was that, when this came before the GAC on 29 October, they reached this agreement that we should move to Article 96 and, more importantly, the move to do that was led by the Netherlands and Finland, not by ourselves. This was widespread recognition of the problem. Secondly, within the Commonwealth, the failure by President Mugabe and Zanu to implement the spirit of Abuja and its letter in terms of the restoration of the rule of law has led to increasing frustration elsewhere in the Commonwealth. I called a meeting of the Commonwealth Ministers Action Group, CMAC, on Monday. As it turned out, it had to be an informal meeting because on the telephone Nigeria was unable to take part but six members of CMAC took part in this, all very concerned indeed about the situation. We have agreed to meet in London in the week beginning 17 December. The date is still to be agreed. (Mr Straw) No; in advance of that. The 75 days expire in January, but it is up to 75 days. Cotonou says you have 15 days to give notice of the shift from Article 8 to Article 96 and up to 60 days for confirmation. (Mr Straw) I am not going to speculate about what exact sanctions we may or may not favour because for me to speak publicly about that without agreement of colleagues would be to rebilateralise the matter. One thing however I would rule out is economic sanctions against Zimbabwe because they would not hurt the leadership of Zimbabwe; they would hurt the people of Zimbabwe who have already suffered. Sir John Stanley (Mr Straw) I entirely share your view about the absolute unacceptability of what Zanu PF have done here. It is further evidence of their desire to rig the system and further evidence of their desperation about the degree to which, over the last five or six years, they have patently lost popular support. They are now trying to reinforce what support they have by the usual methods of people who are desperate undemocratically to cling on to power. There were two big moves. One was to brand a number of journalists -- who are not foreign citizens; they are Zimbabwe citizens who are working for foreign newspapers -- as assisting in terrorism, which was preposterous, and then to bring in this new law which is designed to license journalists presumably on the basis of good behaviour as far as Zanu PF is concerned. I issued a very strong statement against that and made protests to the government in Zimbabwe through our High Commissioner, Brian Donnelly. What you by implication raise is the bigger question of what can the United Kingdom do unilaterally about these things. We do not run Zimbabwe. It is an independent state and, in the ultimate analysis ---- (Mr Straw) Internationally, we use this to build up the case against Zimbabwe very strongly, particularly with the African nations. You will have seen remarks from President Mubeke of South Africa which are increasingly critical and hostile to the Zimbabwe regime. That is of very great importance in the politics in southern Africa. Those remarks are reflected by similar concerns by the government of Botswana. It was the Foreign Minister of Botswana who chaired this teleconference that we had on Monday and there is a delegation, as he was telling me yesterday, from SADC, the Southern African Development Community, which is going back to Harare on 10 or 11 December. Mr Illsley (Mr Straw) I do not think they either derailed or rerailed the Belgian Presidency. Any presidency has to be resilient to events, either within Europe or all over the world, which are unanticipated. They moved commendably quickly following the atrocities on 11 September. You will recall that there was a meeting of the General Affairs Council which was held on the Wednesday of that week, the 12th, and then of the European Council of Heads of Government which was held on the Friday. Following our decisions in the European Council and the General Affairs Council and then parallel decisions of the Justice and Home Affairs Council, the Belgian Presidency has been very assiduous in pushing the antiterrorist agenda, which the JHA agreed in detail under the endorsement of the European Council. That is now moving ahead in this Parliament as well as in a number of other legislatures. People may say we should have gone faster, but with my extensive knowledge of the workings of the Justice and Home Affairs Council on unanimity, Third Pillar, by convention, this is good speed in comparison with what has gone on before. To that extent, the Belgian Presidency can claim some credit. What is also true is that, as our agendas and those of the media across Europe were filled with the atrocities of 11 September and its consequences, other issues have gone further down the agenda and that obviously includes the debate about the future of Europe which would have dominated the European agenda but for 11 September. (Mr Straw) It is feasible to do it. In the four and a half years I have had experience of the European Union, there has been no necessary correlation between the efficiency of a presidency and the size of the country concerned. It does not follow that just because a country is large it will run the presidency with huge skill. On the other hand, I think you are right to say that, other things being equal, it is more difficult for small countries to run the presidency. In addition, we are at the limit at 15 of the principle of a rotating presidency. (Mr Straw) Seven and a half years. British governments tend to change less often in their personnel than most European governments where there are more changes, perhaps because they are more often based on coalitions. To go up to 20, 21, 22 or 23 would mean that a country would not get a presidency more often than once every 10 or 11 years. My belief is that the convention which will be established by Laeken will be delivered on this issue. What kind of presidency do you have? There are a lot of ideas around. There is a proposal to have the presidency solely in the hands of the large countries. I do not think that would run. There are proposals for each council to elect its president and for the president to serve for a longer period than six months and therefore for there to be a kind of college of presidents. I think there is a lot more behind that because what I have observed in the nine or ten presidencies in which I have been sitting in councils is that who the president is, what their chairing skills are like, what their negotiating skills are like, makes a phenomenal difference to whether you get the business done. It is particularly true where you are making decisions on the basis of unanimity, but it is also true on the basis of QMV. I share your scepticism about the future of a revolving presidency. As to exactly what change we introduce, we should and have put forward many ideas into the convention and see which ones start to take off. Ms Stuart (Mr Straw) Laeken is not making decisions about the future of Europe. It is making decisions on the process by which an IGC in three years' time makes those decisions. Expectations will therefore not be raised too high. All these are very important issues that you raise. They have to be debated and addressed inside the Convention and then at the IGC. How do I rate the success at Laeken? Clarity about composition of the Convention, where we are very close to agreement. I think that is satisfactory, for reasons I will come back to. Then, reasonable clarity about how the Convention will operate. One of the things on which we have reached understanding in the General Affairs Council is that the Convention should have as its starting point the four principles laid down in the Nice conclusions and too should aim to produce options for discussion at the IGC, rather than laying down a series of prescriptions. We want to see a gap between the end of the Convention and the beginning of the IGC so that above all national parliaments are able to offer a view on the various options that are raised. Coming back to your first point, drawing on the Prime Minister's Warsaw speech and the one I made at Chatham House in July, what we were both saying there was that the European Union is a union of nation states in which we pool and share sovereignty in order to give our own people a greater degree of control over their own lives, but it will work best if it works as this union of nation states, not as a super state. That view is reflected in the composition of the Convention and, subject to any final decisions that are made by the European Council in Laeken, the proposition is that there will be 15 representatives, one from each of the member governments, 30 national, parliamentary representatives, two from each of the national parliaments, one European parliamentary member from each of the countries and representatives of the Commission and so on. The nation state is properly represented in that composition. (Mr Straw) I am sure Mr Darroch has every detail of this prospectus Directive in his head because his skill and perspicacity go before him. I think it is extremely difficult to have a system where the weight of voting would vary according to the weight of interest. How you would arrive at that, by what process you would translate the pros about the interest in terms of the numbers and in terms of the weighting, would be extremely difficult. As you know, what has been achieved in this government is that we have a reweighting to our voting to give us a greater proportion of the interest in QMV. On any one issue, there can always be an argument as to why any one country should have a veto. There are some issues on which you have to have a veto: national defence, various tax matters and so on. I was struck during my period on the Justice and Home Affairs Council, having begun very strongly attached to the idea of a national veto, as to how often QMV in parts of the JHA agenda would have been helpful to the United Kingdom because we wanted to move things forward. We wanted changes to take place. On one issue after another, you find yourself blocked by the most extraordinary local, national interest. I remember beating my head against a wall in frustration at the fact that the Austrians were refusing to agree to a directive on the recognition of driving disqualification, which is rather important because in Austria we were being told the maximum period for which you could be disqualified was 28 days; whereas the minimum we wanted in the directive was 31. It took a ludicrous degree of effort and time to try and square this circle. The Austrian ministers were saying to us, "If only we could just do this, our parliament would put up with it." There is a fine balance here. Without knowing the detail of this now famous Directive, I would only observe however that what is important on things like that is that not only can we vote at the time when the Directive comes before a council but how much influence we are able to exercise in UKREP, through the office here and through other government departments to get it through national lobby groups in Brussels, to get in on the ground floor. (Mr Darroch) The idea is that the Nice Treaty settle on voting weights, not only for the existing Member States but for all the Member States who are hoping to join in the next few years. Nice should have and we think has settled the whole question of voting weights until we have completed this role of enlargement. Secondly, the Convention chooses to look at any issue that concerns it. That does not mean it is inconceivable that the Convention will want to look at this subject again but what the Convention should be doing is going back to the Nice agenda, those four subjects agreed at Nice, and focusing on them. Thirdly, on this particular Directive, I am not expert but a single market in financial services across the EU is very much in the United Kingdom's interests as one of the main financial service providers in the world, so it is an objective broadly that is very important to us. Lastly, QMV. The figures suggest that we get out-voted under QMV less often than most of the other major EU states. On the whole, QMV works in our favour, not against us. Mr Pope (Mr Straw) I can only speak for my constituency and my constituents but that of course includes yourself, Mr Pope. (Mr Straw) My take on what my constituents feel is slightly different from yours. My constituents do recognise the great importance of our membership of the European Union. It does have a direct impact on their lives. You know the area very well. It is very heavily based on manufacturing. There are still big manufacturers like Phillips, which is a European company par excellence. There is also British Aerospace at one end of the valley and Rolls Royce at the other which, although they are British companies, have very large European connections with subcontractors and so on. We have done our own polling, to be published this afternoon under a parliamentary question. I am sure the Committee will be very interested to see it. It shows a significant level of support for the principle of membership of the European Union and if there was a rerun of the 1975 referendum on membership, "Do you want to stay in or out?", I am clear that there would be an even bigger majority today than there was then. People understand how we are part of Europe and we have to say there. Where I agree with the sense of your question is the people's respect for the institutions of the European Union is much less than it should be. That is not a criticism of people's perceptions; it is a criticism of the institutions. We have to do a good deal of work to raise those perceptions, to cut through the thickets of obscurity and obscurantism in which the European Union often works. It is a big job to do that. I do not agree with you that we have not been clearly speaking out in favour of Europe. If you go to the speeches that all of us have made, we have been. Criticism normally comes the other way, that we have been too unambiguous in favour of our membership of Europe and also our vision for Europe. Our vision for Europe is not a federalist vision in which the nation state is submerged into some super state. It is however a vision of Europe which recognises the importance of the nation state but also recognises that sovereignty is something which, if you give a little away, you end up getting back a lot more in practice. That is what we should be aiming for. (Mr Straw) Your question to me was about the European Union; it was not ---- Mr Pope: It is still about the European Union. If there is going to be a referendum, how can we hope to prosecute the referendum successfully if the groundwork is not being done now on making the case for a successful Europe? Mr Illsley (Mr Straw) When I was giving my answers, I was talking about our membership of the European Union. I accept we could not go into the euro without being members of the European Union but we have been members of the European Union without necessarily being members of the euro. It is a more discrete point. On the press, Mr Illsley, some newspapers are hostile to our membership of the euro. Others are enthusiastic and one or two are in the middle. Those who are hostile to the idea of our being members of Europe per se have to think a bit about how far they are in line with their own readers, not least given the outcome of the last general election where, after all, we kept being told that this was a referendum on Europe, not on the euro and a fairly clear conclusion was offered by electors. Mr Pope, to come back to your point about the euro, there is one policy on the euro and it is a policy which the Chancellor set out at the end of October 1997 -- and it was repeated in our manifesto -- which says that we are in favour in principle of membership of the euro. The point at which we will decide whether or not it is appropriate to recommend membership of the euro depends on these five tests which are basically about the degree to which our economy and Europe's own economy have converged and how far that convergence can be sustained. The Chancellor and the Prime Minister have both made it clear that it will be an assessment which will be made public within two years and there is technical work going on with that now. Mr Pope (Mr Straw) It is a neat way of putting it but it is not one with which I agree. There was one small state there which was the Netherlands. The Belgian Presidency was also represented. There is an understandable anxiety by the smaller states about the larger states and that anxiety is heightened on issues of foreign and defence policy, where the difference between the larger states and the smaller ones becomes more striking. There is an additional factor here: as the focus of events moves to the United Nations and to relations with the US, the United Kingdom and France, two of the five permanent members of the Security Council, tend to attract more attention than the other states, including some of the other larger states. These relationships have to be handled with care. All that said, as I made clear in my previous appearance before this Committee, the overall effect of the leadership which the Prime Minister provided on Afghanistan and the fight against terrorism has been significantly to enhance our reputation across Europe. We need to make decisions at 15 inside Europe or whatever number of Member States, but we cannot have a situation where you can either meet bilaterally or at 15 but you cannot meet in between. We have to try to persuade our colleagues that that is the case. I have said very gently to one or two colleagues in smaller countries that there are plenty of smaller countries which meet in small groups. The Nordics do, sometimes with Norway, sometimes without. The Benelux countries have famously met for years and years and some Europeans meet. Chairman (Mr Straw) It was not a diplomatic blunder. It shows the popularity of leaders coming here. No one came to London to say they wanted to take part in a blunder. They wanted to come in London because they wanted to take part in something they thought was important. That was the point of it. Mr Chidgey (Mr Straw) What Laeken is likely to declare is what is said here, that the EU already has a limited capacity to act in civilian and military crisis management. There is a limited operability of the ESDP. That is the adjective likely to be in the conclusion, although I cannot guarantee that. I can see why you are making this point because there could be an implication from the memorandum that somehow the ESDP was already fully operational, albeit on a small scale. That was not what was intended in terms of the wording. It was talking about the European Union as Member States of the European Union and, although it was not under EU auspices, if you look at the post Essential Harvest operation in Macedonia which had been led by Germany as the lead nation from the EU with a bit of input from the United States, the ESDP will firm up that kind of operation. The really important news is that there has been an understanding achieved with Turkey, as you will have seen from the newspapers, on the future of involvement in NATO. Chairman (Mr Straw) It has not been made public yet but it has been confirmed by Turkey. There are currently discussions going on elsewhere in Europe about it. That will mean we will be able to get ahead with the ESDP using the NATO planning assets or in some cases maybe those of one or two of the Member States. Mr Chidgey (Mr Straw) In terms of the shortfalls, the EU has met 94 of the 144 Helsinki headline goal targets. If you want me to give you the details of those 94, I will have to send you a further memorandum. (Mr Straw) The ESDP is a very important means by which Member States of the European Union will be required to raise the capability of their forces. This is not so much about spend but about how those forces are used and organised. In some cases, it will be about spend but if you look at the spend per head of European Member States on defence and look at their practical capabilities, there is no real correlation there. One of the points that Mr Hoon is making this morning in the speech he is making about defence is about the need for us to be more flexible, but we are right at the leading edge of flexibility in Europe and for other Member States to create much better flexibilities inside their defence forces to meet the demands of today and tomorrow, not the demands of yesterday, which is essentially where a lot of those forces are with very large infantry forces training up for an invasion of Russia, the Soviet Union, across the north German plane. Times have changed. Not everybody in the House agrees that this process of the ESDP will help to strengthen NATO and take some of the unreasonable load off the United States. (Mr Straw) I can give you a better answer to the question on goals. In 1999, the EU set itself a target called the Helsinki headline goal that by 2003 the EU forces should be able to deploy collectively up to 60,000 troops within 60 days and keep that number in theatre for at least a year. It is a difficult but attainable target, but it needs a lot of changes in the way other countries run their forces. Lessons from Macedonia in terms of defence forces? The Essential Harvest and the work that followed that had to be put together on a bilateral/multilateral basis, in a rather ad hoc way. The ESDP, with the very active support of NATO, would provide a better focus for all of this, and a better means of decision making. It also ensures that the burden of providing these forces did not always fall to two or three countries. It is flattering that everybody turns to the United Kingdom first but if we are talking about the defence of Europe it is not a good idea. (Mr Straw) What we will see is the evolution of the role of forces under the ESDP. The EU's experience in the Balkans has been a ten year lesson in how not to do things and in how to do things; the importance of identifying political problems early and identifying the role that military forces can play in assisting a political solution; the need above all for coherent, collective decision taking. If you cast your mind back ten years, Europe in a general sense of that word bears quite a heavy responsibility for some of the chaos that has ensued in the Balkans because we allowed ourselves to be played off by different warring countries and factions inside the Balkans. You know the story as well as I do. One of the reasons why the language of Laeken is likely to be careful is that we do not want to run before we have learned to walk in terms of the practical sides of the ESDP. Mr Maples (Mr Straw) You will know that there is continuing discussion taking place in the House of Lords debate this week about matters relating to that issue of dual criminality. I cannot give you a precise answer because it is a JHA matter. Are we in favour, in principle, of abolishing dual criminality? Yes, because I think it is an ancient and outmoded concept for the generality of crimes. There are some issues which are crimes in some countries which are not in others which could in theory cause difficulty. In practice, I do not think they will. We have to decide what we want here. We have an over-elaborate extradition process which favours criminals and terrorists and not law abiding people. What I argued for successfully when I was Home Secretary inside the JHA, with European colleagues, was that we should get away from any idea of harmonising our legal systems, whether civil or criminal, and instead go for a mutual recognition of our legal systems, given that all of us accept the European Convention on Human Rights, the authority of the European Court of Human Rights, and many other common principles in practice as well as in theory. Mutual recognition is the future. This arrest warrant is one approach to that but for those who are worried about it we have had what amounts to an equivalent of the European arrest warrant with the Republic of Ireland for years. It has not caused any difficulty. (Mr Straw) Far from it. You have to listen to the arguments. I never took the view when I was Home Secretary that what I decided at point X was the way, the truth and the light and there could be no other addition to that. Given the speed with which you have to make decisions, it is always the case that there can need to be further reflection. There was not a single Bill that I had before this House which was not literally improved by debate here and debate in the other place. (Mr Straw) Terrorism is not a vague definition. Although the words used to describe terrorism vary between one jurisdiction and another, everybody knows what we are talking about. It is the use of violence in pursuit of political, ideological ends. The definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2000 for which I was responsible was criticised not for being too narrow but for being too wide. I think it is improbable that somebody elsewhere in Europe would be extradited or transferred under this arrest warrant to another EU Member State for a terrorist offence which did not amount to an offence within that definition in the United Kingdom. On xenophobia, we do not have an offence of xenophobia, but we have offences equivalent to xenophobia. Our criminal law in terms of race hatred and now religious hatred is regarded by our European partners as in the vanguard of good practice. We have had some provisions against race hatred since the sixties. I strengthened those considerably in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. My colleague David Blunkett is further strengthening those in legislation currently before the House. Although people could not be charged here with an offence of xenophobia, their behaviour or the words they are using, the actions they are committing, would lead to criminal prosecution and conviction here just as they would abroad probably through a similar level of offences. (Mr Straw) Let me deal with photographing aeroplanes at military bases. I am very anxious to see the 12 British detainees released as soon as possible because, on the evidence which I have seen, were these people charged with equivalent offences in the United Kingdom, they would almost certainly have been released on bail by now. I have pressed that point repeatedly in a series of conversations I have had with George Papandreou, the Greek Foreign Minister. That said, there are certainly offences that it is possible to commit in the United Kingdom which involve observation of actions taking place in military bases. This is nothing whatever to do with what the British citizens have been charged with in Greece but I can think of circumstances where we have been very concerned about, for example, IRA terrorists taking too close an interest in what has been going on in military bases. That action, apparently just taking photographs, could add up to preparations for terrorism. The way our law works in the United Kingdom -- this is also true in many, but not all, other European countries -- is that there are not that many offences of terrorism itself which lead to prosecution and conviction of terrorists. The definition of terrorism is there principally to trigger additional police powers. The terrorists themselves, once they are arrested and charged with those police powers, are typically charged with longstanding, common law offences like murder, conspiracy, committing explosions, and that would be true in other countries. The terrorist definitions are needed for the powers of detection and interrogation rather than generally to enhance the criminal law. I missed your first point. (Mr Straw) With great respect, if this had been a great problem, why have we not heard this in respect of Ireland? I can think of offences in the Irish criminal law which do not apply here and vice versa. (Mr Straw) We have to work on the basis that members of the European Union have judicial systems which meet minimum standards. That is part of the fundamental principle. (Mr Straw) I can be unhappy with the way in which a particular law is applied without being unhappy with the whole way in which the judicial system operates. I can tell you, Mr Maples, that other countries have plenty of unhappiness, if I may, about our system. For example, France has an entirely legitimate set of complaints against us for the fact that our extradition system means at the moment that people who are alleged to have committed offences of a serious terrorist nature in France have - to pick up your phrase - languished in British jails for five years whilst the British court system works out whether or not these people can be transferred, a ludicrous, risible situation were it not so serious. There are defects in our system. I hope that one of the consequences of the close and mutual recognition of our legal systems is that we use our common experience to point to areas where there could be improvement. The last point I would make is this. All European Union Member States as well as others, particularly all the European Union Member States, are also signatories to the European Convention of Human Rights and accept the authority of the Court in Strasbourg, the European Court of Human Rights, and that is there not only to lay down the minimum standards of conduct, for example under Article 5 and Article 6, but also to enforce those minimum standards as it is increasingly doing. (Mr Straw) I would have to look at the detail but I would just like to make this point. Most of the extraterritorial jurisdiction claimed arises either in respect of international obligations, which we have all signed up to, and the Pinochet case - (Mr Straw) They could be if the evidence was here, but in the Pinochet case the evidence had been collected in Spain but also involved in some cases allegations against General Pinochet which involved Spanish citizens, albeit in Chile. In any event it was they who held the main investigation. Our courts after all looked at the Pinochet extradition issue with very great care and then on a number of occasions, famously, decided it was perfectly proper for that extraterritoriality to take place. As I say, they mainly arise in respect of crimes like genocide and torture and so on, to which all civilised countries have signed up, or sometimes where the country concerned has jurisdiction over its own citizens committing offences elsewhere. Sometimes countries, for example in Europe, have a saving on their extradition arrangements with third countries by which they will not extradite their own nationals to that third country but will try them instead. I will happily follow this up with the Home Secretary. Chairman (Mr Straw) Well, I will ask them to write to Mr Maples. Mr Illsley (Mr Straw) Right. Pace, given the complexity of the process I think it is proceeding at a reasonable pace. We have been instrumental in ensuring there is some pace kept in the process. As you know the United Kingdom has been in the lead there since this Government took office in 1997. At Gothenburg in June, the European Council there, we managed to set clear targets for admission on the first wave. Financial burden is a matter which has to continue to be discussed. Obviously the possibility of the size of the financial burden will lie behind some rather detailed decisions. For example, on how far the CAP direct payments are phased in to a number of applicant states. We welcome the Commission's conclusion in its recent strategy paper that enlargement until 2006 can be financed within the agreed financial perspective ceilings, thank you, Mr Darroch. There is a question beyond that as well. We need to be careful about that. Would I be happy to see any of the first wave excluded? (Mr Straw) We want to see as many countries in the first wave as qualified and we are giving them every encouragement. That is what would make us most happy. We are very anxious to see Poland along with the other applicant states in the first wave and we regard that as important. In the end it is a matter for Poland whether it can close the chapters rather than a matter for us. We want to see them there. I went to Warsaw about a month ago and met Prime Minister Miller and my colleague, the Foreign Minister, there. You will know, also, that Prime Minister Miller came here for an official visit about two weeks ago. We have continued to engage with Poland. On Cyprus, yes, our undertaking to Cyprus stands. (Mr Straw) It is not a question of countenancing delay, some countries which are applicants would not be in the first wave in any event. Rumania does not want to be in the first wave and obviously Turkey, which is not yet within the screening process, will not want to be. If you are saying to me could we close chapters off on which the detail has not been settled in order to get the country into the first wave, no. Could we give every encouragement to countries to ensure they properly meet the criteria of each chapter, yes. Chairman (Mr Straw) May I say it is two representatives from Parliament. (Mr Straw) No, no, not necessarily. There has been no undertaking on that, and no piece of paper I have seen which suggests that. (Mr Darroch) No. (Mr Straw) Yes. (Mr Straw) I am struck by the high quality of the Committee, the forensic nature of its questions, knowledge of foreign affairs and European affairs, so I hope very much that a member of that two member delegation could come from this Committee. Can I give a guarantee about that, the answer is no but I take the point. Chairman: Thank you, Foreign Secretary. |