The European Foundation published in February 2011 a paper entitled, “European Union hypocrisy over Egyptian regime – the discrepancy between generous EU funding and demands for democratisation”, where we stressed that the EU has never had a proper strategy on the region. We noted, “The European Union has supplied extraordinary amounts of funding without any sufficient democratic measures attached.” The EU has proved to be unable to demand reforms from its southern neighbours, and, in the meantime, taxpayers’ money has already been spent, and continuous to be spent, in projects that provided little in the way of democratic progress. The conditioning economic aid to political reform has been unsatisfactory. We noted, “The EU has introduced several explicit conditionality elements into its policy towards Egypt, which have been incoherently applied. The Egyptian government has never fulfilled its commitments to political reform.” In fact, “The European Commission reports have mentioned the slow progress and the reluctance of the Egyptian government to commit to serious political reforms, there was little progress with regards to democracy, human rights and the independence of the judiciary.”
The Commission said, two years ago, that any future EU aid to the democratic transformation processes shall have strong conditions attached and insisted upon. However, nothing has changed so far.
The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has recently published a report entitled “EU Cooperation with Egypt in the Field of Governance”, where it evaluates whether the European Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) have effectively administered the EU support to improve governance in Egypt before and after the Uprising in 2011. According to Karel Pinxten, the ECA member responsible for the report, “The ‘softly softly’ approach has not worked, and the time has come for a more focused approach which will produce meaningful results and guarantee better value for the European taxpayers’ money”.
The report clearly shows that EU aid has been ineffective in improving governance in Egypt.
The audit was mainly focused on Public Finance Management (PFM), fight against corruption and human rights and democracy, during periods before and after the January 2011 Uprising.
The Court noted that the EU has allocated €1 billion in aid to Egypt during the period 2007-2013, but “The Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) failed to ensure that the Egyptian authorities tackled major weaknesses in PFM”, including the lack of budget transparency and accountability, an ineffective external auditing and corruption. In fact, the ECA stressed “The Commission and the EEAS did not react to the lack of progress by taking decisive action to ensure accountability for considerable EU funds, which continued to be paid directly to the Egyptian Authorities.”
The Court noted that Egypt has serious issues in the area of corruption, but “the EU aid has done little to directly address this issue.” The EU has not included specific conditions on corruption in its support to Egypt.
The ECA’s report underlined that “A key feature of the Association Agreement between the EU and Egypt is its insistence on the respect of democratic principles and fundamental human rights”, yet not progress has been achieved in this area. While stressing the Egyptian Authorities lack of commitment, the Court noted “The Commission and the EEAS did not use the financial and political leverage at their disposal to counteract this intransigence.”
According to the Court, “Following the Uprising no new major initiatives were taken to tackle key human rights issues and the measures taken have had little impact to date.” It concluded therefore “The main human rights programme was largely unsuccessful.” In fact, the situation has got even worse since the Uprising particularly as regards women’s and minorities’ rights.
