Special envoy calls for greater involvement in Arab transitions

New EUSR says EU has special responsibility to back democratisation process.

The European Union has a “responsibility” to assist democratic forces in the Arab world, according to Bernardino León Gross, the EU’s new ‘special envoy for the Arab spring.

“We are entering a historic time,” he said yesterday (19 July), “a time for democracy, for human rights and freedom. We cannot afford these processes to fail because of the economic situation.”

León Gross (pictured below) was speaking in Brussels a day after his appointment by national foreign ministers to the newly created post of EU Special Representative for the Southern Mediterranean.

He said that his mandate, which focuses on north Africa, could be expanded to include the Persian Gulf.

León Gross said that Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, wants to increase the level of involvement of the EU “in all these transitions and transformations going on in north Africa and the Gulf”.

León Gross, who spent three years as chief of staff to Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is now part of a taskforce on the Arab spring chaired by Ashton. This group, composed of officials from the European External Action Service, the member states, the European Commission and European lending institutions, has been created to steer the Union’s policy toward democratisation in the Arab world.

Protests

In a sign of the challenges facing him, León Gross was prevented by turmoil in Tunisia from travelling to the country today. Tunisia, whose democratic revolution is farthest advanced, has seen violent unrest over recent days, driven by people who believe that the process of clearing out the remnants of the regime of President Zine Abidine Ben Ali has stalled.

León Gross, who has long experience of the Arab world in his 20-year career as a diplomat, is expected to appear before the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee after the summer break.