Paris, 26 November 2003 – following agreement between the Assembly’s three political groups, Mr Armand De Decker, President of the Belgian Senate, is to stand as sole candidate for the Presidency of the WEU Assembly:

“Armand De Decker to be President of the Interparliamentary European Security and Defence Assembly (WEU Assembly)

A political agreement reached between the three major European political groupings means that in an election to be held in the Palais d’Iéna on 2 December, Armand De Decker will succeed Marcel Glesener (Luxembourg) as President of the Assembly of Western European Union. At the same time Mr De Decker will continue to preside over the Belgian Senate.

Armand De Decker was born in Brussels on 8 October 1948. He holds a degree in Law from the Free University of Brussels and is a member of the Brussels Bar.

His political career began in 1979 as Deputy Secretary-General of the Parti Réformateur Libéral (Liberal Reform Party) of which he is a co-founder.

In 1980, he became an advisor to the Defence Minister, Charles Poswick, before being elected as a member of Parliament for the first time in November 1981. He was then repeatedly re-elected, serving without a break until 1995, when he became a member of the Senate, and was at the same time appointed President of the Bruxelles-Capitale Regional Parliament (1995-1999).

On 14 July 1999, he was elected President of the Belgian Senate, an office to which he was re-elected this year, following last May’s general election.

Mr De Decker was a member of the Council of Europe and WEU Assemblies from 1982 to 1999.

In the WEU Assembly, he has been Chairman of the Liberal Group, Chairman of the Defence Committee and a Vice-President of the Assembly.

He was the author of numerous reports, including the report which was the basis of WEU’s “revitalisation” in 1984 (“Thirty years of the modified Brussels Treaty”, May 1984).

Mr de Decker has always been a staunch supporter of an autonomous European defence policy, complementing NATO, an organisation he still regards as absolutely vital.

He has been assiduous in his efforts to consolidate the interparliamentary framework and scrutiny of the European Security and Defence Policy, in particular by means of proposals developed at two interparliamentary conferences he organised at the Belgian Senate, during the Belgian EU Presidency in the second half of 2001.

The WEU Assembly

The WEU interparliamentary Assembly is to celebrate its fiftieth session next year. The Assembly was set up under the modified Brussels Treaty in 1954, following the failure to ratify the Treaty to establish a European Defence Community (EDC).

The Assembly brings together national parliamentarians from the 10 WEU member states, which are also members both of NATO and the EU, and parliamentary delegations from the remaining EU member states, the European NATO countries which are not members of the EU and the EU candidate countries – in other words 28 delegations*, foreshadowing the future enlarged European Union.

The Maastricht Treaty gave WEU the status of EU body, while the Treaty of Nice transferred all WEU’s operational segments to the EU (Planning Cell, Military Committee, Military Staff, Satellite Centre) with the exception of the WEU parliamentary Assembly – the sole European parliamentary assembly with responsibility for security and defence matters, to which a Council of European Ministers is obliged to make an annual report.

This aspect is all the more important, given that the national parliamentarians who are members of the WEU Assembly are precisely those who, in their home parliaments, pass their countries’ defence budgets and collectively, by extension, Europe’s as well.

The task of the WEU Assembly or, more exactly, “the Interparliamentary Security and Defence Assembly” is therefore an absolutely essential one: regular scrutiny of intergovernmental cooperation on European security and defence policy at a transnational European level.

In this respect it complements both the European Parliament, which is not competent to deal with intergovernmental matters and the national parliaments, which need to be kept abreast of the European dimension of their defence responsibilities »

To contact President De Decker, please get in touch with his Press Attaché at the Belgian Senate: Mrs Ann Frerotte. Tel: 00 322 501 76 58 – Mobile: 00 32475 84 27 96.

*The 28 member countries of the WEU Assembly are:

– 10 member states: Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom
– 6 associate member countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Turkey
– 5 observers: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Sweden
– 7 associate partners: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia.