EC DG DEVCO Director Henriette Geiger : ISTC is a Cost-Effective and Flexible Mechanism for Mutual Information Exchange
Ms. Henriette Geiger, the Director of Directorate People and Peace of the Directorate General for Development and Cooperation of the European Commission (DG DEVCO) recently gave an interview to the magazine of the Behorden Spiegel Group ‘The European Security and Defence Union’.[1] In the conversation, dedicated to the effective development aid through coherent and concrete projects, she had the following to say about the incentives for the European Union to participate in ISTC:
The European:
What is the added value for the EU to be represented in the ISTC?
Henriette Geiger:
The ISTC, which is based in Astana (Kazakhstan), is an intergovernmental organisation co-funded by the UE, the US, Japan, South Korea and other global partners. Under the umbrella of the ISTC, cooperation and capacity building activities on security matters are discussed and initiated under a co-funding mechanism. Examples are water security in Central Asia or secure uranium transport in Central Africa. Such cost-effective and flexible mechanisms provide mutual information exchange with strategic partners in sensitive areas and reinforce multilateral and regional cooperation.
The EU official also highlighted the input ISTC may have in the endeavor of the European commission to engage strategic partners from the UN family and other mission-based or regional organizations.
[1] ‘The European Security and Defence Union’ is a bimonthly magazine issued by ProPress Publishing Group Bonn/Berlin, the organizer of the congress on European Security and Defence (Berlin Security Conference), the European Police congress and the European congress on Disaster management. Its Publisher and Editor-in Chief is Helmut Buhl, Brussels.