Your Excellencies,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a pleasure for me to welcome you today in the city of Brdo, for this Stability Pact Working Table III Seminar on “Regional Security Cooperation, from Stability Pact to the Regional Cooperation Council”. I would like to thank all of you for being here as well as my Working Table III colleagues who organised the Seminar, with the assistance of the Slovenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In a little more than half a year, the Regional Cooperation Council will take over from the Stability Pact, new headquarters will be opened in Sarajevo and people will start working there.

The aim of our gathering today is to take stock of the progresses achieved by Working Table III initiatives on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, to look ahead at how regional security cooperation in SEE can be further strengthened in the framework of this new structure, the RCC.

Far from any purely political and descriptive meeting, I would like this meeting to be used as maybe one of the last opportunity before the formal transition, to analyse the past and present successes and difficulties, in order to better shape the future. Therefore, I would like to suggest addressing a number of points that will help our reflection:

• How can the SP/RCC initiatives facilitate regional cooperation in the perspective of Euro-Atlantic partnership?
• What are the priorities for the region itself that initiatives should concentrate on and how to ensure that this work complements that of other regional and international partners?
• How can the RCC support the initiatives and strengthen their links with international partners, in the light of Euro-Atlantic integration?

The first session will look at cooperation on defence and security issues in SEE. The second one at migration and border management, and the third and last one at the SEE as a partner in combating organised crime and corruption. In all these three sessions, the fundamental questions will be the same: how can we improve the cooperation and coordination of the existing structures with their international partners, like the EU, NATO, OSCE, IOM, ICMPD, Interpol or bilateral partners. We should also look at this cooperation inside the region itself and intensify the links with structures like SEEGROUP or SEDM.

The usefulness and successes of the Stability Pact initiatives have been recognised, but time has come to find ways to make them more sustainable. I count on all of you today to feed the debate with your ideas and suggestions. The RCC cannot afford to simply take over the responsibilities of the SP. It also needs to bring new dimensions and a new dynamism in the work of the initiatives.

I am glad now to give the floor to my dear colleague, Mr Andrej Ster, State Secretary in the Slovenian MFA.

I thank you all for you attention.