The Diplomat
The European and Latin American parliamentarians meeting this week in Madrid on the occasion of the XV Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (EuroLat) yesterday showed their support for the Bi-regional Strategic Association, stressed the need to revitalize multilateralism and reiterated their condemnation of “unjustified illegal aggression and unprovoked by the Russian Federation to Ukraine”.
The headquarters of the Senate in Madrid hosted from last Monday until yesterday the XV Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (EuroLat), the parliamentary institution of the Bi-regional Strategic Association of the European Union-Latin America and the Caribbean, which meets in plenary session once a year.
In yesterday’s session, the 150 members of EuroLat -75 MEPs and 75 representatives of the parliaments of Latin America and the Caribbean, including the Parlatino (Latin American Parliament), the Parlandino (Andean Parliament), the Parlacen (Central American Parliament), the Parlasur (Mercosur Parliament) and the mixed parliamentary commissions of Chile and Mexico – debated and voted on the reports and recommendations prepared throughout the week by the commissions and working groups and evaluated the results and conclusions of the third Summit of leaders of the EU and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), held just a week ago in Brussels and the first since 2015.
In their final conclusions, the European and Latin American parliamentarians highlighted yesterday the need to continue promoting and strengthening the Bi-regional Strategic Association based on common principles, values and interests, and insisted on their support for the various regional integration processes, such as the Agreement on Association between the European Union and Central America, the Association Agreements with Mexico and Chile, and the Association Agreement between the EU and Mercosur, which they hope will be ratified before the end of the year.
Likewise, EuroLat members defended the importance of revitalizing a rules-based multilateralism to address major global challenges and reiterated “the condemnation of the unjustified, illegal and unprovoked aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine.” The mention of the war in Ukraine comes after the XXVIII Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government, held last March in Santo Domingo, promised to “work for peace in the world” without mentioning Ukraine. and that at the recent EU-CELAC Summit all Latin American leaders, except Nicaragua, expressed their “deep concern over the ongoing war against Ukraine.”
Likewise, the European and Latin American parliamentarians stressed the need for the governments of the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean to intensify their efforts to work on a recovery from the different inflation, food, health, migration and energy crises that have created greater inequalities.
“We concluded the fifteenth EuroLat Assembly successfully and with great satisfaction”, declared Javi López, MEP and co-chair of Eurolat, during the closing of the event. “We have had the opportunity to assess the III EU-CELAC Summit that took place last week in Brussels and to open a new stage in our bi-regional relations”, he continued. This new stage, he stated, must be “characterized by greater dialogue, by a stronger institutionalization of our ties and by the will to address, together, the great global challenges that confront us today, such as climate change, threats to our democracies, or the questioning of international law”.
“Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have highly valued the diversity that EuroLat contains, and that the search for the points that unite us is more important than the divergences that arise between us,” said Amado Cerrud, congressman Panamanian elected president of Eurolat by the Latin American component in this XV Assembly in Madrid. “We will go hand in hand with Europe reaching more agreements than disagreements and decisively impacting our societies to help make this world a better place,” he added.
The activities of the Assembly began this past Monday with an audience at the El Pardo Palace by King Felipe VI and continued on Tuesday with the meetings of the commissions and working groups. The official inauguration took place on Wednesday in the Senate chamber with interventions, among others, by the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares; the president of the Congress of Deputies, Meritxell Batet; and the president of the Senate, Ander Gil. Yesterday the plenary session of the EuroLat Assembly will be held and later the closing of the Assembly took place, with the interventions of Ander Gil, Javi López and Amado Cerrud.
