Malta’s application to join the Partnership for Peace (PfP) will be decided upon on Friday in Bucharest, Romania, where NATO will be holding its summit between 2-4 April.
Enlargement is expected to be high on the agenda with potential invitations for accession being made at the summit, the NATO agenda for the week reads, where US President George W. Bush will be pressing NATO allies to support membership plans for the Ukraine and Georgia – two former Soviet nations.
In a TV interview on Mediatoday’s Reporter, which will be aired tonight at 7:40pm, foreign minister Tonio Borg said government “was committed to discuss the finer details of the partnership programme with the Opposition.”
The decision to reactivate the PfP application, frozen since 1996, was met with consternation from critics after Cabinet announced its intention to apply again to join the PfP.
The government said it was being excluded from the EU meetings which deal with NATO security documents, but it did not inform the Opposition of its intention.
NATO and EU officials meet on a regular basis on the level of foreign ministers, ambassadors, military representatives and defence advisors. Since the enlargement of NATO and the EU in 2004 and the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU, both organisations have 21 member countries in common. Austria, Finland, Ireland and Sweden, are members of the EU and of NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme.
However, Cyprus and Malta, which are not PfP members and do not have a security agreement with NATO on the exchange of classified documents, cannot participate in official NATO-EU meetings. This is a consequence of decisions taken by NATO and the EU in December 2002, before the 2004 round of enlargement took place, when NATO had 19 members and the EU 15.
Informal meetings including these two countries take place occasionally at different levels.
On Friday, NATO members will meet in Bucharest which will be the biggest NATO Summit, given the number of partners and other international organisations who will be present.
At Bucharest, Heads of State and government will assess the situation in Afghanistan and Kosovo, as well as in other regions where NATO is engaged.