Paris, 18 December 2006 – Kosovo will be one of the European Union’s biggest operational challenges in the near future, according to Pertti Torstila, Finnish Secretary of State at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Addressing the WEU Assembly on Monday, as Finland winds up its six-month EU Presidency, he said that the EU was continuing “preparations for a possible civilian mission in the province after a status settlement,” and that the aim would be to strengthen the police and judicial systems and “to move Kosovo towards further European integration.”

In a wide-ranging speech, Mr Torstila said it was “essential [for the EU] to come to a conclusion on the future peacekeeping operation” in the Darfur region of Sudan, and to maintain its financial and military presence in Afghanistan, he said. The EU was probably be in “for a long stay” in Afghanistan, where it would “face big problems”. But there was “no other way but to continue with this strong commitment,” he affirmed.

Summing up the EU’s security and defence record of the last six months, he noted that “more than 10 crisis‑management operations, most of them civilian, on three continents,” were in progress and that several more were on the way. The first two battlegroups, one Franco-Belgian and the other German-Dutch-Finnish, would be on stand-by readiness on 1 January, and the European Defence Agency (EDA) had started producing concrete results: implementation of the Code of Conduct on Defence Procurement to “inject transparency and competition” into the European defence equipment market, and the launch of the first R&T Joint Investment Programme. The Finnish Presidency had also focused on “situational awareness, through better information sharing” among members to enhance civil-military cooperation.

Asked about Finland’s neutrality, Mr Torstila said that public opinion was “very clearly in favour of military non-alignment,” and that politicians would take this into account in the run-up to the country’s general elections next March. But Finland would continue to participate in military and non-military international activities.

Responding to criticism from the floor about a lack of EU cooperation in evacuating civilians from Lebanon during the crisis last summer, he said that the operation had gone “well on the whole,” and that 50 000 people had been air or sea-lifted through Cyprus under the auspices of EU experts.