News and Features

Members of the EU Parliament visit EUMM Headquarters

26.02.2009

On 25 February, the European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM) received the visit of two members of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE), Chairman Mr. von Wogau and Richard Howitt. The European Parliamentarians wanted to get an insight into EUMM’s work on the ground.

The Head of Mission, Ambassador Hansjörg Haber, briefed the two delegates about EUMM’s mandate and structure, pointing out the restructuring of the field offices after the first four months. By mixing the national contingents, EUMM has achieved a more European stance on the ground. Composing monitoring teams of nationals of different European countries, they really profit from the different backgrounds and experiences and give a living example of the European idea.

Ambassador Haber briefed the parliamentarians on the joint efforts by EUMM, OSCE and UNOMIG to implement the incident prevention mechanism adopted at the last round of Geneva talks. All three organisations were eagerly trying to overcome the last disagreements among the conflict parties and, thus, to achieve that a first meeting of the incident prevention mechanism can be held soon.

The European parliamentarians were also interested in learning more about the start-up phase of EUMM. These “lessons learned” could help to improve administrative and financial rules in order to allow the smooth deployment of EU missions in future crisis situations.

On 26 February, the two delegates visited Field Office Gori in order to meet with monitors and gather the impressions of the people who really work in the field.



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