Thank you, Madame Chairperson.

I join my colleagues in welcoming Lord Robertson to the Permanent Council this morning and telling you, Mr. Secretary-General, that we very much appreciate the energy and leadership you have displayed and the great contribution you have made to more effective cooperation between NATO and the OSCE.

We agree with your view that NATO and the OSCE share common philosophies and values and that this provides a firm foundation for our work together.

I have agreed with much of what has been said around the table welcoming you here this morning, but I want to draw one distinction and that is on the question of NATO expansion.

You in your presentation made clear that one of the fundamental contributions the OSCE has made is laying out a set of principles and commitments by which we live. One of those is the affirmation of the sovereign right of all of us to join or not to join treaties of alliance, and I think that is a very important point that we always have to remember.

I would like to thank you for your highly informative report on the extensive and valuable cooperation between NATO and the OSCE, both in Vienna and Brussels, but probably more importantly in the field.

This cooperation, as you have mentioned, has grown stronger as the result of lessons learned over the past several years, particularly in the Balkans, and is now producing substantive results across a very wide range of activities.

A recent example is the SFOR assistance to the international police in Bosnia to help break up a human trafficking ring and to free 12 women held there, and the outstanding effort by KFOR to provide security for the municipal elections that have just taken place in Kosovo. In each of these instances, as in countless others, NATO assistance was essential in helping to achieve key OSCE objectives.

We agree with our EU colleagues, however, that more remains to be done.

We need to be able and ready to cooperate more quickly and effectively in possible future crises. The institutional links that incorporate the lessons we have learned from our cooperation in the Balkans will help improve the ability of both organizations to respond to challenges in the future.

We look forward to strengthening those institutional links between the organizations, as well as continuing in enhancing our cooperation in the field.

Thank you.