Russia's G8 summit is the big event this week

EUOBSERVER / WEEKLY AGENDA

Russia's G8 summit is the big event this week

Tue Jul 11, 2006 22:44

Russia's G8 summit is the big event this week

This WEEK in the European Union

08.07.2006 - 11:32 CET | By Andrew Rettman

EUOBSERVER / WEEKLY AGENDA (10 - 16 July) - Russia's G8 summit is the big event this week, with Putin, Bush, Blair, Merkel, Chirac and Prodi on the guest list and with big topics such as energy security, nuclear proliferation and the global HIV situation on the agenda.

The 15-17 July meeting in the Constantine Palace outside St Petersburg will see the west seek access to Russia's oil and gas markets and a common line on Iran and North Korea, while debating if China, India and the EU should also join the club.

After the degradations of the 1990s, Russia will be keen to show it has become a modern superpower or "sovereign democracy" - subservient to nobody but open to market economy-type reforms and a team player in global diplomacy projects.

But opposition figures such as chess champion Gary Kasparov will lead protests against Russian political repression and human rights abuses in the run-up to the summit, with reports indicating that a 20,000-strong security force has already begun to crack down on would-be demonstrators.

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and Finnish EU president Matti Vanhannen will also make a beeline to St Petersburg for talks, while Kazakhstan leader Nursultan Nazarbayev will speak on behalf of the post-Soviet CIS countries.

The summit falls just as the EU is starting secretive internal talks on a post-2007 energy and security pact with Russia and with Helsinki planning to make better EU-Russia relations a key theme of its EU presidency despite uneasiness in some new member states.

Finland comes to Brussels
The fresh Finnish presidency will also send a bushel of cabinet ministers to set out details of its programme to parliamentary committees in Brussels this week, with foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja before the foreign affairs committee on Wednesday.

EU finance ministers will on Tuesday formally endorse Slovenia's 2007 eurozone entry with a celebratory party in the European Commission on Thursday. The Tuesday meeting will be broadcast live on the internet under new transparency measures agreed in June.

New Italian foreign minister Massimo D'Alemo will find it hard to avoid the subject of Italy's collusion in CIA kidnappings while meeting external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Wladner and home affairs man Franco Frattini on Wednesday.

Azerbaijan oil minister Husein Bagirov will also drop into Brussels on Wednesday, as energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs goes out to Ceyhan, Turkey the same day to cut a ribbon on the new BTC oil pipeline shipping Azerbaijan's oil to Europe.

Africa comes to Europe
Further afield, Ms Ferrero-Waldner and Mr Frattini will on Monday take part in a minister-level EU-Africa conference on immigration in Rabat, Morocco as Spain, Italy and Malta struggle to cope with the flow of African desperadoes across the Mediterranean sea.

Communications commissioner Margot Wallstrom will on Wednesday take the commission's popularity roadshow - the plan D tour - to Scotland for a string of public debates with a youth and culture focus.

Back in Brussels, the Court of Auditors will tell MEPs in the budget control committee on Thursday what it thinks about EU translation and interpretation costs and the environmental fall-out from EU projects in the third world.

Old ghosts
Meanwhile, old ghosts will haunt the EU courts in Luxembourg on Tuesday morning as judges give their final verdict in the case of Edith Cresson.

The former commissioner and French prime minister is synonymous with EU fraud - famously paying her dentist €250,000 of EU taxpayers' cash for bogus research - and helped bring down the Santer commission in 1999.

A February opinion by advocate general Leendert Adrie Geelhoed suggested the court strips Ms Cresson of 50 percent of her EU pensions rights.

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Printed from EUobserver.com 11.07.2006

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Russia, US might seal WTO deal before G8 summit, say officials
People's Daily Online, China - 56 minutes ago
... States could be finalized when US President George W. Bush meets his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on the eve of the G8 summit scheduled for July 15-17. ...

GOOGLE NEWS UPDATES: G8 Summit:

Revealed: G8 plan for global nuclear expansion

By Rob Edwards Environment Editor
http://www.sundayherald.com/56617

World leaders are planning a massive expansion of nuclear power in their own countries and across the developing world, according to documents drawn up for the G8 summit and leaked to the Sunday Herald.

An action plan for “global energy security” to be agreed in St Petersburg next weekend envisages a network of nuclear fuel plants in G8 countries combined with the widespread sale of reactors to developing countries – as long as they promise not to use them for making nuclear bombs.

G8 leaders also want to resurrect fast breeder reactors, which are highly controversial because they “breed” plutonium, a nuclear explosive. It was this type of reactor that was pioneered, and abandoned, at Dounreay on the north coast of Scotland.

Environmentalists accuse leaders of “double standards and dangerous hypocrisy”. But the G8’s nuclear plans are likely to be backed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose own much-heralded energy review favouring new nuclear stations in the UK is due to be launched this week.

The G8 summit is due to take place in St Petersburg between July 15 and 17, just over a year

after the leaders of the world’s eight most powerful countries met at Gleneagles in Scotland. This time it will be led by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has put global energy security at the top of the agenda.

Confidential drafts of the energy “plan of action” drawn up by the “sherpas”, the senior G8 officials who guide prime ministers and presidents towards the summit, have been passed to the Sunday Herald.

One of the plan’s main aims is to spread nuclear power stations around the globe.

The latest version of the action plan says: “Those of us who have plans relating to the use and/or expansion of nuclear energy believe that its development will promote prosperity and global energy security, while simultaneously offering a positive contribution to the climate change challenge.”

Improving the economic com petitiveness of nuclear power will “benefit all nations”, the plan argues. But nuclear expansion has to be based, it says, “on a robust regime for assuring nuclear non-proliferation and a reliable safety and security system for nuclear materials and facilities”.

The idea is to keep the more sensitive nuclear facilities that can be easily diverted for making bombs within the G8. Other countries would not be allowed to enrich uranium fuel, or to reprocess spent fuel to extract plutonium.

They will be permitted to run reactors to generate electricity but will have to buy fuel enrichment and reprocessing services from G8 countries. “Participation of developing countries in a ‘shared nuclear energy system’ through developing the network of international centres providing nuclear fuel services could be a viable option for reducing their energy poverty and bridging the energy gap,” the plan says.

At the same time, G8 leaders are proposing to bring back fast breeder reactors, which were scrapped in Germany, France and the UK in the 1990s because they were too expensive. They are designed to create and burn plutonium and are much less reliant on imports of uranium.

The leaked action plan says: “A significant step in promotion of self- sustainable nuclear power would be attained through the development of innovative nuclear power systems based on closed nuclear fuel cycles with fast neutron reactors.”

This is a dramatic change, since fast reactors have been off the political agenda in Western countries for at least a decade. And it will run into fierce opposition because of the risks it poses for international efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons.

“We’ve come to expect double standards and dangerous hypocrisy from the G8 but this year they are set to surpass themselves,” said Shaun Burnie of Greenpeace International.

“On the one hand we have the endorsement and promotion of the most dangerous nuclear technology ever conceived – plutonium fast breeder reactors and reprocessing – while at the same time condemning the nuclear proliferation threat from Iran and North Korea.”

WWF Scotland director Dr Richard Dixon added: “Incredibly, this rich boys’ club seems on course to peddle reactors to the Earth’s poorer nations, at the same time as they are warning us how terribly dangerous the world is.”

Among the G8 countries, only Italy and Germany are sceptical of the nuclear future. Russia, the US, Japan, Canada, France and the UK are all enthusiasts and see great potential for increasing nuclear business.

Two versions of the G8 global energy security plan of action have been leaked, one dated March 6 and the other May 12. On nuclear energy their wording is similar in substance and there are no sections in brackets, suggesting the text is not in dispute.

The drive for nuclear power is being led by Putin, who is keen to maximise Russia’s technology expertise. He has a plan for mass producing reactors, installing them on barges and selling them around the world as “floating nuclear power plants”.

09 July 2006