The NATO Parliamentary Assembly is the inter-parliamentary organisation of legislators from the member countries of the North Atlantic Alliance as well as 14 associate members. The Assembly provides a critical forum for international parliamentary dialogue on an array of security, political and economic matters. Its principal objective is to foster mutual understanding among Alliance parliamentarians of the key security challenges facing the transatlantic partnership. Assembly discussions and debates make an important contribution to the development of the consensus that must underpin Alliance policies.
The aims of the NATO PA should be seen within the context of the role of members of parliament in the field of defence and security, particularly in today's environment.
The changing nature of security and NATO's transformation have given a new salience to the role of parliaments in defence and security. The traditional parliamentary tasks - oversight of defence and the armed forces, including authorising expenditure and deployments "overseas", building consensus, ensuring transparency, and generating and sustaining public support - are well established in member countries, albeit with different degrees of application and emphasis. Today, these tasks are carried out in a more demanding environment. The new roles and missions for armed forces, the widespread need for defence reform and restructuring, and the pervasive influence of the revolution in information technology, particularly with regard to the media, all suggest a higher profile for parliamentary involvement.
Furthermore, the commitment of candidate and partner countries to establish the mechanisms and priorities for democratic control of armed forces has also meant greater attention be given to parliamentary practices.
Against this background, the aims of the NATO PA can be defined as including the following:
• to foster dialogue among parliamentarians on major security issues;
• to facilitate parliamentary awareness and understanding of key security issues and Alliance policies;
• to provide NATO and its member governments with an indication of collective parliamentary opinion;
• to provide greater transparency of NATO policies, and thereby a degree of collective accountability;
• to strengthen the transatlantic relationship.
These have been longstanding goals of the Assembly. Since 1989, the following have been added:
• to assist in the development of parliamentary democracy throughout the Euro-Atlantic area by integrating parliamentarians from non-member nations into the Assembly's work;
• to assist directly those parliaments actively seeking Alliance membership;
• to increase co-operation with countries who seek co-operation rather than membership, including those of the Caucasus and the Mediterranean regions;
• to assist in the development of parliamentary mechanisms, practices and 'know how' essential for the effective democratic control of armed forces.
In fulfilling these goals, the Assembly provides a central source of information and point of contact for member legislators and their respective national parliaments. The Assembly's activities also enable the Assembly to contribute to making the workings and policies of the Alliance more transparent and comprehensible to parliaments and their publics.
Most of the Assembly's funding is provided by contributions from the parliaments or governments of member nations. These contributions are based on the criteria used for the NATO civil budget. NATO also provides a subsidy.
In recent years, special contributions have been made by Norway and NATO to support the Assembly's Rose-Roth programme. Many other nations have also provided support for specific Rose-Roth activities.
The Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed forces and the Swiss government also sponsor several of the Assembly's activities related to the training of parliamentary staff and new members of parliament.
The annual budget is about € 3 million. This is used to cover the International Secretariat's operating costs. National delegations are responsible for funding the participation of their members in Assembly activities.
The Assembly's Treasurer is responsible for drafting the Assembly's budget which is submitted to the Standing Committee and the full Assembly for consideration and adoption.
This website provides information about the Assembly's five Committees, special working groups, seminars, and biannual sessions held throughout Europe and North America. It also provides key speeches and articles by the Assembly's officers.
Plenary Sessions
The Assembly meets twice a year in plenary session - a spring session of three and one-half days and an autumn session of five days.
At the spring session, each of the five committees holds a one-day meeting to consider reports and to meet with government officials and policy experts. On the last day, the Assembly meets in plenary to conduct Assembly business, debate key issues and hear from key national and international leaders.
At the autumn session, reports are adopted, taken note of, or rejected by the Committees. Only those reports which are adopted subsequently appear as official Assembly Reports after the Session.
The Committees also prepare Policy Recommendations which are then put before the one-day plenary sitting for consideration, amendment and adoption. They then represent the formal position of the Assembly.
These Policy Recommendations are not binding, but are widely distributed to governments and parliaments of member and associate member nations. NATO's Secretary General also provides a written reaction to each of the Policy Recommendations.
The Plenary Sitting at the autumn session is usually addressed by the Assembly's President, a senior representative of the government of the host nation, and NATO's Secretary General. Elections also take place for Assembly officers. The President and five Vice-Presidents are elected for one-year terms and can be re-elected once. The Treasurer is elected for a two-year term and can be re-elected twice.
NATO Parliamentary Assembly Activities
The Assembly typically holds about forty events each year. These are:
Plenary Sessions
There are two plenary sessions each year, one in spring, usually towards the end of May, and one in autumn in either October or November. The sessions are held in member or associate member countries.
Committee Meetings
The Assembly's five Committees meet during plenary sessions, and occasionally at other times. The Defence and Security, Economics and Security, and Political Committees, for instance meet each February in Brussels for meetings with senior NATO officials.
Sub-Committee Meetings
Each of the eight Sub-Committees usually meets twice per year. The locations depend upon the interest of the Sub-Committee concerned.
Seminars
Each year, the Assembly usually holds three Rose-Roth seminars and two Mediterranean Dialogue Seminars.
The New Parliamentarians Programme
Since 1999, the Assembly has held an annual New Parliamentarians Programme. This is open to parliamentarians from any delegations involved with the Assembly who are new to international responsibilities within their parliament. For instance, new members of delegation, new members of a parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, etc.
The Parliamentary Transatlantic Forum
The Assembly holds an annual Parliamentary Transatlantic Forum in the United States. Organized in co-operation with the Atlantic Council of the United States and the National Defense University, this meeting enables members of the Assembly to discuss transatlantic perspectives on the full spectrum of Alliance issues with American policy specialists.
The Mediterranean and Middle East Special Group (GSM)
The Mediterranean Special Group usually meets three times a year. In addition to the two annual seminars, members of the Group organise a visit every year to a country in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
NATO-Russia Parliamentary Committee (NRPC)
This Committee brings together the heads of member delegations and the heads of the Russian delegation in an "at 29" format that mirrors at parliamentary level the NATO-Russia Council. This Committee meets during the Assembly's plenary sessions.
The Ukraine-NATO Interparliamentary Council (UNIC)
The Ukraine-NATO Interparliamentary Council consists of representatives from each of the Assembly's committees and leading members of the Verkhovna Rada. The Council meets twice each year: once in Brussels and once in Kyiv.
The Georgia-NATO interparliamentary Council (GNIC)
The Georgia-NATO Interparliamentary Council is composed of two Vice-Presidents of the Assembly and the Head of the Georgian delegation to the NATO PA. They are responsible for coordinating all Assembly activities related to Georgia .
Hearings at the European Parliament
History
The idea for an Assembly engaging Alliance Parliamentarians in collective deliberations on the problems confronting the transatlantic partnership first emerged in the early 1950s and was consummated with the creation in 1955 of an annual conference of NATO parliamentarians. The initiative to found an Assembly reflected a desire on the part of legislators to give substance to the premise of the Washington Treaty that NATO was the practical expression of a fundamentally political trans-Atlantic alliance among democracies.
The foundation for co-operation between NATO and the NATO-PA was laid in November 1967 when the North Atlantic Council recommended that an informal relationship be established between the two bodies. As a result of these deliberations over the following year, the Secretary General, after consultation with the North Atlantic Council, now responds to all Assembly recommendations and resolutions adopted in its Plenary Sessions. In 1974 the Belgian Parliament granted the NATO-PA special legal status, and that same year, the leaders of Allied governments, in their Declaration on Atlantic Relations, recognised that "the cohesion of the Alliance has found expression not only in co-operation among their governments, but also in the free exchange of views among the elected representatives of the peoples of the Alliance." This declaration essentially endorsed the work of the Assembly without mentioning it directly.
In response to the historic events at the end of the Cold War the NATO-PA broadened its mandate in 1991 when it first began to admit Eastern and Central European countries as Associate members. In forging this new relationship with Central and Eastern Europe, the Assembly benefited from its autonomous status as it was able to move far more quickly than the consensus-bound NATO to respond to changes that were fundamentally altering the international security and diplomatic landscape. The Assembly swiftly developed close relations with political leaders in newly democratic states, and those ties, in turn, greatly facilitated the dialogue that NATO itself would soon embark upon with the region's governments. Contacts were also made with parliamentarians in many of successor states of the Soviet Union including Russia and Ukraine. In 1990 then President of the Assembly Congressman Charlie Rose and Senator Bill Roth initiated the NATO-PA Rose-Roth programme of seminars and conferences to deepen co-operation with the parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe.
The Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Co-operation and Security Between the Russian Federation and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, signed in Madrid in May 1997, and the NATO-Ukraine Charter signed in July 1997, explicitly charged the Assembly with expanding its dialogue and co-operation with both the Russian Federal Assembly and the Ukrainian Rada. At that historic Madrid summit, in which the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary were formally invited to accede to NATO, then NATO-PA President, Senator William Roth, addressed the heads of state gathered for the occasion. The invitation from NATO leaders to Senator Roth represented a tacit acknowledgement that the Assembly had played a key role in paving the way to enlargement and would have a central role both in encouraging parliamentary ratification of NATO enlargement and in deepening the dialogue with Russia and Ukraine.
The increasing attention to security in the Mediterranean region in the 1990s culminated in 1996 with the creation of the Assembly's Mediterranean Special Group (GSM), a forum for co-operation and discussion with the parliaments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region focussed on political, economic, social and security issues.
Nato's 50th Anniversary Summit held in Washington DC on 22-25 April 1999 was also a milestone for the Assembly. The Assembly's then President, Javier Ruperez (Spain) addressed the meeting of Heads of State and Government on 24 April and with other leading Assembly members, participated in a variety of other Summit meetings and events.
Mirroring the creation in Rome (May 2002) of the NATO-Russia Council, a major step forward in NATO's co-operation with Russia, the Assembly created the NATO?Russia parliamentary Committee to allow discussions at the level of 27. Meeting twice a year during sessions, the Committee has become the main framework for direct NATO?Russia parliamentary relations.
In 2002, the Assembly also decided to upgrade its special relationship with Ukraine by creating the Ukraine-NATO Interparliamentary Council (UNIC). The Assembly's co-operation with the Verkhovna Rada was progressively strengthened in the run-up to the Ukrainian Presidential elections in 2004, during which members of the NATO PA were involved in the election monitoring in support of the members of the international community's effort.
The events in Ukraine almost coincided with the beginning of the celebrations for the NATO parliamentary Assembly's 50th Anniversary, which were inaugurated in November 2004 during the Annual Session in Venice, Italy. For the first time, the entire North Atlantic Council joined members of the Assembly in Venice for a special plenary meeting.
As a further sign of the strengthened relationship between the Assembly and NATO, former Assembly President Congressman Doug Bereuter was invited to address the Alliance's Summits in Prague (November 2002) and Istanbul (June 2004). Assembly Presidents are also regularly invited to address the meetings of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC ambassadors).
In 2004-2005, the Assembly also decided to bolster its relations with parliaments in the MENA region. At the Venice session, the Standing Committee created the new status of Mediterranean Associate Members, opening the door for increased co?operation with MENA parliaments. The new status was soon granted to Morocco, Algeria, Israel and Jordan.
In closing the celebrations for its 50th Anniversary at the Annual Session in Copenhagen in November 2005, the Assembly presented a commemorative book: "NATO Parliamentary Assembly, 1955-2005. 50 years of Parliamentary Democracy, including contributions from Alliance leaders, key Assembly members and staff.
