Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ministers, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to join you again this year for a discussion of the challenges facing the region with regard to law enforcement, migration, and terrorism and want to thank our hosts for the outstanding hospitality and organization of the meeting .

Representing the Stability Pact and Special Coordinator Erhard Busek, I want to focus on those crucial elements of regional institutions that support your work and benefit the regional cooperation agenda. Please recognize that the Stability Pact is starting a transition to full regional ownership and leadership over the year ahead, more on that later.

First and notably, the SECI Center.  This regional undertaking has entered a period of encouraging opportunity, which, if used wisely, will enable it to achieve its true potential.

But to do that, the SECI Center needs your attention and full personal support.  Experts are working to clarify the Center’s legal status to ensure a fruitful cooperation with EUROPOL.   We urge that all SECI member states give their full support to the prompt conclusion of these negotiations on the Center’s legal status. The first meeting will be November 6-8 in Bucharest.

The engagement of the EU itself has been reinforced this week by the establishment by the Finnish Presidency of a ˝EU support group˝ which will include the European Commission, the Council, Europol, Germany, Austria, Romania, and Finland; this is clearly a step forward.

Still, as this process moves ahead, I ask those EU members participating in SECI to demonstrate their firm interest and support for SECI in all of the respective EU structures, including within the Europol board, the Article 36 Committee of the Council, and the CARDS Committee.  This will ensure that SECI receives full and fair consideration within the overall EU strategy on law enforcement in the region.

You will soon have another opportunity to advance this essential regional cooperation effort.    The SECI Center will host a senior level meeting on November 29 to discuss the Center and its work and to strengthen operational links between country representatives in SECI and their colleagues back home in capitals. 

I hope that you ensure that your Ministries will be represented at an authoritative level at the meeting in November.

While the SECI Center is focused on coordinating law enforcement activities, the prosecutorial dimension is important to successful law enforcement.  Thus I encourage you to become more familiar with and support the work of the South East Europe Prosecutors Advisory Group SEEPAG, which Slovenia currently chairs.

Through SEEPAG, the region’s prosecutors are working together  effectively on such issues as witness protection, and are addressing existing mechanisms to assist witnesses in transborder organized crime cases.

The Chairmanship will rotate to Turkey in 2007 and the permanent secretariat may be established in Bucharest, co-located with the SECI Center.  Prosecutors are essential to successful convictions and SECI and SEEPAG are a natural team to improve the cooperative record in that regard.

Dr. Busek and I are pleased that the Stability Pact’s effort against organized crime is moving integrally closer to SECI.  The Pact’s SPOC initiative is becoming an efficient legal service provider for the SECI Center as a step toward the Center having its own legal department. There are several priority areas: data protection, witness protection, stolen vehicles, credit card fraud, trafficking in persons, and the aforementioned SEEPAG. As a further example, SPOC experts will directly support SECI in the new legal working group.

On general police cooperation, it is important that you support the South East Europe Police Chiefs Association (SEPCA) as a coordination focal point for regional police cooperation.

Given the anti-corruption challenge today, let me mention the ongoing transition of the Stability Pact’s anti-corruption initiative SPAI to regional ownership, which worked successfully on a regional basis to coordinate common efforts against corruption. Over the past three years, SPAI has organized more than 70 anti-corruption training programs and conferences involving some 3,500 people and focusing on such issues as public procurement and management of public funds. 

One excellent development: a number of regional governments have stepped forward to begin to fund the SPAI effort, recognizing its value and we look forward to a similar commitment from those governments which have yet to confirm.

Your ministries have the lead on another key regional initiative, the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Initiative DPPI.    We look to regional governments to support the initiative financially and to ensure a strong Ministerial attendance at the proposed Ministerial Conference on Flooding in Bucharest February next year. 

We are pleased that there is a consensus to extend the Ohrid Border Management Process another year through the end of 2007 and most of you have recently received a letter from Dr. Busek asking for your official confirmation so that the November 8-9 meeting in Podgorica can take the formal regional decision.

Completing the picture with a point on the regional initiative on Migration, Asylum and Refugee Returns MARRI, I strongly urge you to look for ways for your governments and ministries to be more pro-active and supportive of the MARRI center and its work.

MARRI has a great potential – as a regionally owned and led institution – to help you achieve your policy goals and to demonstrate that a regional institution can resolve truly difficult problems.

Lastly, let me highlight the Stability Pact’s own coming transition to regional ownership and leadership and the proposed creation of the Regional Cooperation Council under the political umbrella of the South East Europe Cooperation Process, the SEECP. 

We are working with Croatia as SEECP Chairman in Office to achieve a clear transition framework by mid-2007 and, in tandem with the follow-on Bulgarian SEECP chairmanship, a full transition to the RCC framework, led by a senior political figure from the region, by the February 2008 target date.

This is a historical undertaking and step for the region, and it is one whose time has clearly come. 

With Justice and Home Affairs a key priority for the new structure, I am looking forward to the region’s efforts within the RCC to be fully supported by, and coordinated with the agenda pursued by Brdo Process participants.

Dr. Busek and I believe that the Stability Pact’s transition process opens up the real possibility of a close link between the RCC and the Brdo process, and we look to the SEECP to explore the potential of such a connection to the important work being undertaken by your governments in the Brdo Process.

The issues and problems being discussed here today and by the current Stability Pact Working Table III program will not go away.  We all share an interest in achieving notable and measurable success.   So I encourage you again to look for concrete ways to support the broad agenda I focused on in my brief remarks.

Thank you.