JOINT MINISTERIAL MEETING OF THE HELSINKI AND OSPAR COMMISSIONS (JMM)

Declaration of the Joint Ministerial Meeting
of the Helsinki and OSPAR Commissions

___________________________________________
Bremen, 25-26 June 2003

We, the Ministers and the Member of the European Commission, meeting jointly as the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission (the Helsinki Commission - HELCOM) and the OSPAR Commission for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North East Atlantic (OSPAR), stress the benefits from our friendly collaboration on issues of great concern to all members of those Commissions, which encompass both the European Community and twenty-one participating States - differing widely in their size, in their economic bases and interests, and in their relationship to the sea, spreading across Europe from Archangel to Cape St Vincent and Greenland and including Member States and candidate countries of the European Union, Member States of the European Economic Area and States and territories outside both those organisations. We have been assisted by the active participation of many non-governmental organisations as observers.

2. The fruits of this innovative first joint meeting of two regional seas organisations will help us work together more effectively in fulfilling our long-standing commitments to work for the conservation and sustainable use of the world's oceans and seas and, in particular, of the North East Atlantic and the Baltic Sea.

3. Changes in Europe - the enlargement of the European Union; the increasing interdependence of the marine environments of different countries; the ever-growing public interest in, and concern for the seas; the European Union initiative to develop a strategy to conserve and protect the marine environment - make it essential for us to develop and improve the ways in which we work together in HELCOM and OSPAR. In particular, we commit ourselves to work with the European Union initiative and, in collaboration with the other marine conventions, to extend and develop it, within our fields of competence, into a European Marine Strategy for the seas around Europe, which can receive the commitment of other Conventions and their Contracting Parties. Through such developments, we must exploit the possibilities for synergy between all the international bodies and national authorities involved. These developments will also enable us to deliver the commitments that we re-affirmed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development to strengthening regional cooperation and coordination between regional organisations and programmes dealing with the seas.