 Llyrganeisio iawn, mae gennychwyd i toynau Dr Tili Caen anodd cael ei wneud yn y llawdd amgylcheddau i'r pethau eu dynodau cymrydol, unrhyw am eu cyfryd ym myneddau CSSP i gyfrifod. Mae phoenedd y dyfodig ddeudd yn y mesud i ystod yn 2010. Rydnaeth so,��ud yw hefyd yn ysgolion ystod yn Ysgol Llein. gyda 2003-2009, ac yn y periwyr yw'r Secretary of State at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland gyda 2007-2008. Dr Tilly Khanon was the special representative of the Prime Minister of Finland in the Convention on the Future of Europe in 2003, 2002-2003, and a member of the OSCE panel of eminent persons. I always think that sounds very special. Eminent persons on European security as a common project, and that was well led by somebody whom I think we know quite well Ambassador Wolfgang Ishinger in 2015. Dr Tilly Khanon, as I mentioned, is focused on issues related to European integration, external relations CFSP and CSDP, and in general on European security policy, which of course is at the top of the agenda. A particular interest to us is that in 2006 the Finnish Government commissioned an independent expert study on the implications of Finland's NATO membership. I think Dr Tilly Khanon will analyse the implications of NATO accession for Finland as outlined in the expert report. She was one of the authors with another Finnish colleague and also a French and Swedish foreign policy expert, and this was presented in April 2016. In another important paper, which is of considerable interest, I think, and very topical at the moment she produced a paper in December 2016 analysing the European security and global strategy for security and defence, which the high representative has presented earlier in the year, and of course there was a considerable amount of discussion towards the end of last year on this particular area. As a fellow EU member who is not a member of NATO, your presentation will be of particular interest to us and we have co-operated in very many both UN and EU missions. The Finnish and Irish military have worked together, not only worked together, but I think as the military colleagues could attest we have worked together very well. So you are most welcome Dr Tilly Khanon and we wait to hear you with interest in your presentation. Madam Chairperson, excellence is ladies and gentlemen, I first express my gratitude and pleasure of this invitation. I'm more than happy to share my thoughts with you during these 30 minutes on the current policy of Finland in the field of security and defence. I would like to start with the general policy line as it's formulated in today's Finland. I will look a little bit on the NATO report. In fact there are two of them. There was as rightly stated here an earlier report in 2006-07 and a fresh newer one where I was involved which was published last year. So it's a newer document in that field. Our Madam Chairperson rightly pointed out the environment, the Finland security political environment has changed a lot during the past three, four years. I don't know if Finland's analysis of her own position and in particular when it comes to the more long term policy lines, this far has changed that much. The cornerstones of our security and defence policy were formulated immediately after the end of the Cold War and when Finland joined the European Union. I will go briefly through the cornerstones as I call them of our security and defence policy here. There are basically three of them. When Finland applied for EU membership, security political implications of the membership and our expectations concerning the security political implications of EU membership were one of the key factors. There were academic studies about public opinion which show clearly that people expected economic benefits position around the table, so influence in European politics identity to confirm the Finnish identity in the Western institutions but also there were concrete security political expectations. That's one of the key backgrounds why Finland has a lot of expectations still today concerning the EU as a security political actor. This, of course, does not only relate to the EU's security and defence policy. It's broader and has with many policy fields to do with the EU. But anyway, it's the background that encourages us to engage ourselves fully in whatever steps are taken within the EU's security and defence policy. This is how we see it today. We don't see any restrictions for our participation. I will get back to this still in the later context but we have a very open-minded approach also towards the most recent stages on the EU's agenda when it comes to defence policy. We want to get the most out of the EU's role in this respect as a non-native member, of course, that strengthens our thinking. But also recently bilateral security political, defence political co-operation has been increasing. So we have conducted or concluded agreements with many countries in our neighbourhood but also with the US, UK, Poland, Denmark and Sweden which is the most important partner in this context. The second cornerstone deals with our defence policy and here I would like to make one observation. For those of you who have followed this terminology we know we all started as neutral countries. When Finland joined the European Union there was a domestic debate about whether neutrality would be compatible with our obligations as an EU member and the end result of that discussion was negative. So in that context we stopped using the concept of neutrality and changed the formulation into non-alignment and it was said that Finland maintained the hard core of its formal neutrality and that is military non-alignment. But there was also a signal with that. As we understood neutrality, the meaning of neutrality being an aspiration to stay outside eventual military conflicts in the region, stay neutral in military conflicts. We can argue that once the country joined the EU and this is the Finnish approach we no longer started from the assumption that this would be our aspiration. We wanted to be engaged and committed within the European Union. When the EU got as a part of its Lisbon Treaty the so-called mutual defence clause 42.7 there is also a written legal demand for commitment in this respect. So the non-alignment term was supposed to signal also a change of policy in this respect. And the current formulation that has been enforced since 2007 is still less. So nowadays we don't even refer to Finnish military non-alignment. The word that we use now is in our official documents such as White Books, Governmental Programs. Finland does not belong to any military alliances. So this is the current description. Finland relies on national defence and does not belong to any military alliances. And unlike Sweden, as you remember, Finland didn't carry out any major defence reform after the end of the Cold War. My thinking was not in my country that the security political landscape has changed more permanently and there is a reason to reform our defence system. This was the thinking in Sweden, whereas in Finland did not carry out a major reform in our defence system. We maintained territorial defence and conscript army and cornerstone of our policy national defence. Finland not belonging to any military alliances and relying upon her territorial defence with conscript army. And now the third and most controversial in this respect of course because here is the word NATO and also the membership possibility. I would say that these forms of Finland's policy when it comes to its relationship with NATO are pretty stable now. On the one hand, we have been constantly deepening our partnership with NATO. The recent formulation and form of our partnership has the abbreviation of EOP, Enhance Opportunities Partnership, which was created in I think in the summit of Wales in 2014 in the summer. It's a small group of countries with far-reaching cooperation with NATO. Finland participating in NATO's common exercises and operations is already a tradition of Finland's security policy. It's not controversial anymore. It used to be when it started, it was some criticism but nowadays it's a well established policy. And of course the objectives of that policy are also seen to be beneficial for the second cornerstone so they are seen to support our military capabilities, our own territorial defence. When it comes to the membership approach this is also something that has been stable for two decades more or less, the political field being divided, two parties of our multi-party system that are in favour of Finland's accession to NATO, the Conservative party currently in the government and the Swedish people's party, whereas all the others are internally divided, hesitant or against NATO accession. And the level of public opinion reflects this, so it's between 20 and 30% of the Finns that are in favour of Finland's NATO membership in the current circumstances. But there is a great, great but because the government in every single document stresses that even if membership is not on the agenda now the government maintains a possibility to apply for membership later if there is a need. Of course you might think about the significance of such a formulation. It's meant to, as I see it, as a signal that this situation might change and also it implies that the government wants to make sure that such an opportunity exists if it would be needed. So Finland, even if it's not a NATO member, very much supports the open doors policy of NATO which is of particular importance today when times are changing in the transatlantic relationship. Now I try to move forward a bit faster. Ladies and gentlemen, as I mentioned this current three-party government when it came into being in the spring 2015 and as the three parties have somewhat different lines on the NATO issue deciding that the government should commission an independent study of the implications of NATO membership. So that was a very fast project conducted during the spring 2016 and published in April 2016 where our four group consisting of four persons went through the possible implications. It was not our task to arrive at the conclusion whether it would be beneficial or not for Finland to join just assess implications of all sorts. And here in these two slides I will simply conclude our findings. We said, among other things, the following. We said that when it comes to technical preparedness and interoperability Finland would basically be ready for full membership any day. And this was also based on our interviews with the NATO capitals so we were not making these assessments ourselves. We were studying the issue and arriving at the conclusion. So I spoke a well-known security policy expert was one of our team and Mats Barryquist, the Swedish diplomat, then a new barrier and myself from Finland. This is what we heard. Finland has a long tradition of NATO-led operations NATO-led exercises so technically the interoperability is well developed and it would be to plug in and Finland membership would be technically ready not of course politically. We on the other hand stated that even if technically it would be a very simple step to be taken in strategic terms it would not. And this is what we stressed a bit to the other direction that Finnish membership like Swedish membership or both would join would have major strategic implications for the north of Europe or the Baltic Sea region. We based this part of our analysis on the assessment of Russian military capabilities, their location and also Russian military strategy. Perhaps we can get back to this if you have questions but I will rush forward. Perhaps the part that evoked most debate or at least was found to be interesting led to our conclusion concerning a possible Russian reaction because this is perhaps something that ordinary Finns also think about. Would we be punished as everybody, it's quite obvious and has been openly stated that Russia doesn't like the idea of NATO getting further expanded towards its borders and the Finnish membership in particular would mean that in very concrete terms. On the basis of our studies and assessment we came to the conclusion that a Russian reaction would be expected, would be very likely but the scale of that reaction it would be both long-term and short-term meaning that it implied sanctions of some type immediately and of course the long-term implications deal with the strategic planning of Russia dealing with its troops and those kinds of things but we still said that the scale of these sanctions would be nothing, cannot be compared with those of that Ukrainian or Georgian NATO membership would lead to. These are of course huge things and huge conclusions. We did a comprehensive study, our report however was pretty short and concise on these things. Three more things that we stressed in the report and then I'm into my final slide. We wanted to point out even if we only studied the implications of Finland's membership that in this very issue the linkage between Finland and Sweden and what they do or don't on the NATO issue is crucial. So we wanted to point out that there is a mutual dependence between Finland and Sweden concerning the NATO accession. If you think about our geopolitical location Finland with 1,300 kilometres of common border with Russia if you think about such a situation where Finland would not join NATO but what Sweden would join all the other Nordic countries would then belong to NATO including the Baltic countries and then Poland so the entire Baltic Sea region practically would be a NATO region whereas Finland would be outside. You can think about the strategic consequences of such a change so this is what we mean when we say that whatever one of these countries does in terms of NATO accession has is significant for the other also when it comes to its political planning and assessment of the situation. We can also turn it around and think about the situation if Finland would join Sweden's long country to the south and strategically that would be of importance for Sweden as well. So in political documents we find these formulations in Finland and also from the current government that whatever these two countries will do in terms of the NATO accession they should do it together so more or less hand in hand even recognising that in two sovereign countries this is perhaps not that easy to get the consent of also the public opinion at the same time but if we would live in an ideal world this is how it would look like these two countries would take this decision either of staying outside or joining in good cooperation with one another. The final remark here and then I leave the rest of this study for your consideration in terms of questions and comments. We stated also when we were thinking about the process of application in current conditions the assumption we made in the report was that this I don't want to call it new Cold War this new confrontation between Russia and West will continue for some time and most likely if Finland would decide to join NATO Russia would wish to influence on that decision with all possible means including by influencing public opinion in the country. The Finnish political leadership is committed to a referendum on this issue so if whenever such a decision to join NATO will be made it has to go through a referendum and if we think about an efficient influence of an external actor that has a strong view on the issue would there be more efficient agendas than the one dealing with referendum so that's why we state that if Finland ever decides to apply for membership it should seek to shorten the time from application to join in to diminish external influencing and this was also based on the interviews that we were conducting. Now finally and it's now I use two minutes in order to respect the time table given. So that was the NATO assessment on the basis of our report not on the basis but our report was taken into account in the government's white book that was published last summer on Finland's security and defence policy or two different white books. In the background but very much this atmosphere of technical interoperability, political and strategic challenges was also included in the two white books. I would like to conclude this presentation by saying that in these conditions of serious confrontation very tense situation around the Baltic Sea region military, more visible military activities on both sides new troops in the Baltic countries and Poland from NATO new troops also on the Russian side the lack of proper political or security political dialogue Russian action in Ukraine and Crimea all of these of course have led to the fact that security and defence in my country is much more on the agenda on an everyday basis. And from that point of view when I get back to the original agenda of Finland's willingness to cooperate the policy more or less is that national defence but apart from that strong willingness to cooperate on all possible for security political cooperation including the bilateral forms as I said and once the EU's security and defence policy had some new openings since late 2013 much more pragmatic approach one could perhaps say more focusing on capabilities capability development defence-related funding instrument for defence-related research and all of these to enhance cooperation in the field of practical capabilities among the EU countries and perhaps to steer the agenda away from this eternal institutional discussion about about the relationship between the EU and NATO what the EU can do in order not to challenge NATO and steer the discussion towards a more joint agenda about capabilities that then can be used on both by the EU as well as by NATO I think this is something that has been welcomed by Finland and Finland is also supportive of the direction where the EU's security and defence policy and its focus are gradually getting back to the EU's own territory and its borders and the former emphasis on crisis management operations is there but it has become complemented by other needs so to say in this environment so border security, the EU's policy concerning hybrid threats but also the new talk about the EU's role when it comes to territorial security is something which Finland welcomes we have also stated in our policy documents that the EU's article 5 so the article 42.7 in the Lisbon Treaty that has been implemented once in the context of the Paris terrorist attacks we would be happy to support a bit more stronger preparedness in support of that the future use of that article so signaling a willingness to move forward also in this respect Nordic Defence Cooperation should be mentioned here it's something that is a part of Finland's approach and in particular bilateral cooperation with Sweden that seems to move forward fast and where at least Finland does not seem to have any restrictions concerning its participation I will conclude my presentation by pointing out one important process that currently is almost concluded in Finland which is quite a change in Finnish thinking as well it's a legislative process where Finland changes its domestic legislation so that it will be possible from that day on when the new law enters into force to assist a state asking for military assistance Finland this far has not had legislative possibilities to give military assistance with combat forces to another state so crisis management operations yes in that framework assistance to other states but with military means but with not combat forces so this is a very principal change in our thinking and legislation and of course is presented and seen in the light that if we are a member of the EU and we take the EU's 42.7 provision in the treaty seriously and we want to make sure that we have also the legislative preparedness for full participation and implementation of the EU's mutual defence clause if there will be a need as we know when there was the first request it took the form of crisis management support for France in its operations but it next time will be different my country then has a similar preparedness as a majority of the EU countries because as a majority also our NATO countries it's more or less assumed that this preparedness exists Ladies and gentlemen, many thanks for your attention