Members of Parliament on the Standing Committee on Foreign and European Union Affairs yesterday stressed the importance of the presence of a representative of the Maltese parliament at the European Parliament.

MPs Jose Herrera and Jason Azzopardi both said that such a representative would be useful for continuity. When asked, Dr Azzopardi said he had twice written to the Speaker of the House on the matter. He said that as far as he knew, the government was still in the process of choosing the people who would represent the Maltese parliament at the European Parliament.

Speaking at the publication of the second annual report of the Standing Committee on Foreign and European Union Affairs (SCFEA), committee chairman Dr Azzopardi said this year had been marked by a number of official visits to the Czech Republic, Croatia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia.

He said another achievement this year was a video conference with the Maltese Members of the European Parliament as well as various meetings with ambassadors of countries that were due to take over the EU’s presidency. The committee also met the Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the General People’s Congress of Libya to discuss bilateral relations between the two countries.

Dr Azzopardi also spoke at length about the scrutiny committee within the SCFEA. The workload, he said, had increased considerably since this sub committee was, as its name suggests, set up to examine EU documents in order to assess their legal and political importance and determine whether they should be debated or analysed in more depth, depending on the documents’ importance and implications.

To this effect, the committee had engaged four research analysts who examine these documents. In reply to a question from The Malta Independent, Dr Azzopardi said the committee needed more research analysts but the financial resources required for this were lacking.

He said this year the scrutiny committee had considered 357 new EU proposals that had been deposited in parliament, which is a slight improvement on last year when 311 documents were scrutinised. Since the committee’s inception in May 2004, more than 780 documents have been scrutinised.

On the plans for 2007, Dr Azzopardi said the committee intends to increase inter-parliamentary cooperation by paying official visits to Italy, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and India during the first six months next year.