25 May 2001

Mr. Chairman,

I have the honour to speak on behalf of the European Union. The Central and Eastern European countries associated with the European Union Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia as well as the associated countries Cyprus, Malta and Turkey align themselves with this statement.

The European Union wishes to recall that its position regarding the financial aspects of the United Nations costs related to the Qana incident of 18 April 1996 is based on the following elements:

• the costs resulting from the incident were of a specific kind;
  
  
• an appeal to have the costs financed through voluntary contributions would be welcome;
  
  
• the costs should be kept in the budget; and
  
  
• the financing of the United Nations peacekeeping operations should continue to be of a collective responsibility

The European Union Member States abstained on preambular paragraph 4 and operative paragraphs 2, 3 and 15 of draft resolution A/C.5/55/L.77 because we consider the text, as drafted, inappropriate in the context of the resolution dealing with financing of UNIFIL. The broader political aspects of the events, including the incident at Qana, were debated in the General Assembly in April 1996, resulting in resolution 50/22C of 25 April 1996. We made our position on the broader political aspects clear in our Plenary statement at the time and in our voting on that specific resolution. The European Union wishes to underline that, likewise as in the past years, we would have wished that the consultations in the Fifth Committee could have been confined to the budgetary aspects.

I thank you, Mr. Chairman