The Diplomat
All the parliamentary groups, with the exception of Vox, have supported the creation of a sub-committee within the Commission on International Cooperation for Development of the Congress of Deputies to make proposals for reforming the Law on International Cooperation and the entire cooperation system.
The proposal for the creation of the sub-committee was made last Wednesday by IU Deputy Roser Maestro, who chairs the International Cooperation Committee, after the government expressed its intention to approve in 2021 a new Law of Cooperation for Sustainable Development and a reform of the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development (AECID), as announced by Foreign Affairs Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya, in her appearance in the Chamber on June 18.
The sub-committee will have a period of six months to make its proposals and will be made up of fifteen members from the different groups, including VOX, despite not supporting the creation of this body, according to Europa Press.
The objective is that the reforms will be operational one year later, so that in 2023, with a renewed cooperation system and with a greater capacity to execute expenditure, the General State Budget (PGE) will include Official Development Assistance (ODA) of 0.5 percent of the Gross National Income (GNI).
As explained in the explanatory memorandum of the proposal for its creation, given that the law dates from 1998, it is a matter of adapting the entire system of Spanish cooperation to make it effective within the framework of Agenda 2030, which sets out 17 Sustainable Development Objectives, with 169 goals that make them up, which are of a transversal nature and strongly interrelated.
To this end, the sub-commission will call upon experts, authorities and cooperation actors to analyze the current regulatory framework and to prepare a report with proposals to update it and design “with the maximum possible consensus, the basic lines of the regulatory norms and the institutional architecture of the cooperation system”.
