European Communities (Definition of Treaties) (Stabilisation and Association Agreement) (Republic of Albania) Order 2007

I join the previous speaker in welcoming this order and from these Benches we wholeheartedly approve it being passed. I was also a member of the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments which, at the end of June, listed this draft statutory instrument for approval by the House. I thank the Minister for her explanation of the background to the treaty with Albania. Incidentally, it is considered to be a very well-written treaty and a good model for future occasions when there will be other applicant countries, although not necessarily only from that geographical part of the world. We on these Benches were grateful for the way in which the UK Government also took an enthusiastic lead with other countries. On the tally the Minister described recently, around half of national parliaments have already ratified, plus the European Parliament. Presumably that process will continue apace, although I imagine there will be the usual summer interval before most parliaments resume again in September—unlike our own Parliament, which resumes a little bit later than that. Although the situation since the July 2005 parliamentary elections was not entirely satisfactory—indeed, the way in which those elections were administered were not considered to be 100 per cent—none the less, they were impressive for a newly democratic-structured country, and the international observers considered the anomalies to be within the bearable spectrum of examples, compared with other countries. That was rather encouraging. The country has, therefore, been recovering from some of the tensions and turmoil involved in those elections and the later local elections. President Bush received an extraordinary welcome in Albania. It was described by the previous speaker as a hero’s welcome, and some people, prima facie, thought that that might have been the case but, then again, there may have been second thoughts that it was a competition as to who would be able to snatch his watch. There were further doubts about what happened with that article and differing explanations were given by the State Department and the President’s office in the White House. Albania is, by all appearances, firmly intent on being a strong ally of the West and it is an applicant of increasing respectability for joining the leading institutions in which it has expressed interest—NATO and the European Union—even if that process is inevitably slow. The country has benefited from considerable support from the European Union’s aid programmes, the support programmes under this treaty and the UK’s development assistance that has been mentioned. With those thoughts, we are pleased to support the order.