EU Presidency Statement - Capital Master Plan

Mr. President,

I have to honour to speak on behalf of the European Union; the Candidate Countries of Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey; the Countries of the Stabilisation and Association Process and potential candidates Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Serbia and Montenegro and the EFTA countries Iceland and Norway, members of the European Economic Area, align themselves with this statement.

We wish to highlight the importance of the Capital Master Plan to the European Union and our intense disappointment that it proved impossible for the Fifth Committee to agree a resolution at this session.

Nevertheless, we feel that the preparatory work for the resolution which we have undertaken has been essentially meaningful. We have had a good dialogue and motivations and objectives of delegations and groups have been discussed on this vital issue. We regret that the key elements of our proposal did not get the approval of the host country. We obviously will come back to all these issues in the 59th session.

At the plenary meeting of the Fifth Committee earlier this month I made a statement on behalf of my group regarding the CMP. In that statement, we have set out the clear messages we wanted to include in the resolution, including the responsibility of the host country and the need for more financing and construction options for the CMP.

Mr President, the EU believes that the provisional offer of an interest bearing loan does not meet our expectation of the host country responsibility and requests the Secretary-General to study all options, including a more substantial offer from the United States that would allow us to proceed with the CMP in the most cost-effective manner.

The EU continues to be firmly committed to the CMP and we are ready to cooperate both with the secretariat and with delegations to take a decision on UNDC5 in the fall.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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