 So it's a great pleasure for me to introduce Stephen Hill. He's the Legal Advisor and Director of the Office of Legal Affairs at NATO. In that capacity, he advises the Secretary General of NATO and the Secretariat on all legal issues. I'm going to say Mr Hill about your taste, Stephen Hill. No, please, please, please, yeah. Also served as legal councillor to the US Mission at UN in New York and also worked in the legal unit at the International Civilian Office in Kosovo. And in both roles, his responsibilities included a strong policy component focused on supporting the rule of law and conflict and post-conflict situations. Stephen has also worked in the Office of Legal Advice with the US State Department and you did a very broad career there, much of it in the area, I think, of human rights. We were talking about that earlier, and conflict resolution, post-conflict resolution. And was the Chief US Negotiator for the landmark UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a convention with which I am familiar and which was a great step forward, I think, in that area. So with that, Laura, do we hand the floor to you and look forward to what you have to tell us? Well, thank you very much for the kind introduction, Ambassador. Let me also thank the Institute for the kind of invitation to speak here today. I really do appreciate the chance to present my perspective as the legal advisor for the NATO Secretary General on one of certainly the most pressing issues that I think is facing the transatlantic community today. And I choose the word transatlantic carefully because I think that NATO-EU relations is an issue of concern, not just for European countries, but also for our whole transatlantic community, including my home country. I do need to make an official disclaimer, which is that my remarks are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of NATO or its allies. And before moving on to the topic, which is NATO-EU relations from an international law perspective, I really would be remiss, particularly in this lovely setting, if I didn't recall that our Secretary General, our then Secretary General, Anders Bult-Rasmussen, was here in this very house in 2013, and he spoke about the great value we attached to Ireland's participation in the Partnership for Peace. And I can only say today to really reflect this same gratitude that NATO and our 29 allies remain now, as then grateful for the important contribution that Ireland makes to the maintenance of international peace and security. This includes through UN peacekeeping, United Nations peacekeeping, we were talking about that prior to this meeting, but also to NATO-led operations, for example, in Kosovo and in Afghanistan, and to a number of NATO activities, for example, our trust fund for countering IEDs, improvised explosive devices, that is really helping the situation in Iraq. And so we're very grateful to that. Of course, this partnership fully respects and we fully respect Ireland's policy of neutrality. We think that the partnership is a valuable symbol of our mutual commitment to work together to promote the development of a just and peaceful international society that's based on the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. And I say that not only because we're here in Ireland, but because these values, the rule of law, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are the same values that are at the heart of the work that NATO and the European Union are undertaking now. We share, indeed, 22 of the same member states. So in NATO we have 29 allies spanning from Turkey to the US and Canada, with 22 EU member states in between. We had 28, it was easier actually to do NATO-EU talks up until June of this year because we had 28 and 28, but we've just had Montenegro join the fold in June of this year, and that was an important development. So I mean just by virtue of the fact that we share 22 members means that we have to stand together and work together to continue to protect the interests of our people and their security. It's a pretty exciting time for NATO-EU relations. NATO-EU relations are kind of a perennial, as you know, at least certainly since the end of the Cold War. But I personally think it's a very exciting time and that's probably why I suggested this topic for today. Let me just tell you why. So last July in Warsaw, my boss, Secretary General Stoltenberg, signed a joint declaration with Presidents Junker and Tusk, also in the presence of high representative Mogherini, to set out the determination of NATO and the European Union to move forward together, to increase the cooperation in a number of areas, and to do so in a spirit of collaboration and not competition. I think this was done in recognition that it's vital that we make the most of the means that are at our disposal and not waste them through duplication or unnecessary competition. I mean this is part and parcel of the overall kind of economic and resources environment that we find us in as well. So this was a historic joint declaration. We've never had something like that with the European Union before. And even more kind of operationally in December of now last year, we agreed to turn the joint declaration into a concrete working plan, agreeing on 42 practical measures across a wide range of areas. I'll go into some of them a little bit later. But even more important than these documents, which really for people who have followed kind of transatlantic security or NATO-EU relations, I think we'll appreciate the historic nature of these agreements. There really has been, I feel, a change in the culture of the relationship. Cooperation is really now the expected norm and it's expected from the leadership on down. It's clearly an expectation and it's not the exception. So for example, as I was telling some of us just before this, just this week we concluded a really unprecedented set of parallel and coordinated exercises. A lot of what we do in the military and in NATO is to do exercises in which NATO and the EU work together to address a fictitious yet I think realistic scenario in the European space. And so that in and of itself was a very important development. And next year the EU will actually take the lead on these parallel set of exercises. So as I said, it's an exciting time in NATO-EU relations. Since I'm approaching things from the legal perspective, the purpose of my presentation is to put out there the legal framework that's developed over the years to underpin this cooperation and actually make it possible not only in the current desired configuration, but maybe however the relationship might develop in the future. And I actually think that in terms of the disciplinarity of this, it's an interesting lens, the legal framework is, through which to understand not just the historical development of European relations, but maybe suggest some areas for its future potential. So with your permission, let me just delve back into history a little bit. Some of this sounds like ancient history to people that are working in the field, but I promise I won't go before 1990. It's not so ancient. And here's what I think. I mean, I know maybe not everybody in here is a lawyer, but I actually think that this is a really prime example of how a range of institutions and structures, and why do I say a range because actually there's more institutions involved in this whole game than just NATO in the EU, can actually be made to through where there's political will and where there's some diplomatic and even legal energy put into it. They can be made to develop in a way that facilitates cooperation while at the same time respecting the different policy orientations, not only of member states, but of the organizations themselves, as well as the decision making autonomy and institutional integrity of each of the organizations. So this is a classic example of international institutions and international cooperation evolving in special ways, and I think it's worthy of study, and I hope you will agree with this as well. So I mentioned that NATO and the EU were not the only actors in this puzzle over the years. There's been a third actor, and this is where I'll go start going back in history, and just to point to the Western European Union, the W.E.U., which has since been now exist anymore, but it was a key player in the legal framework and the institutional framework for NATO-EU relations. So a first step, of course, was the adoption of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty on the European Union, which includes the provisions about the common foreign and security policy CFSP. So under the Maastricht Treaty, and the lawyers in the room will forgive me, especially since this is coming from a clearly non-EU person, forgive me for the basic information, but the CFSP would include all areas of foreign and security policy and all questions related to the security of the Union, therefore also the military aspects. And the W.E.U., the Western European Union would serve as the European Union's military arm. The EU would request the, this is the way it was to work, the W.E.U. to elaborate and implement decisions and actions of the European Union that would have defense implications. Now I don't need to highlight, especially for this audience, a very important aspect of the Maastricht Treaty, and this is probably one of the first legal innovations, as it were, that has enabled things to move forward appropriately, which is the important general provision that the CFSP shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defense policy of certain member states. So of course we refer to this as the Irish clause, but it's also has facilitated the subsequent membership in the European Union of Austria, Finland, Sweden in the years to follow. So at the same time, together with that clause, the Maastricht Treaty also provided that the CFSP shall respect the obligations of certain member states under the North Atlantic Treaty, which is NATO's treaty, and be compatible with the common security and defense policy that's established within that framework. So that's what we call the NATO clause. And that's the second innovation, legal innovation, you can call it, that actually helps provide the kind of package that moves things forward. So on the one hand, the respect for the particular character of security and defense policy, and on the other hand, the NATO clause. So that was the first, in the Maastricht Treaty, the first step. The second step, which kind of at the same time, was the adoption in 1992 of the so-called Petersburg tasks during a ministerial council of the Western European Union. These tasks were meant to address a broad range of topics, many of which I think are dear to Irish policy as well, humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping tasks, crisis management, peace building, etc. An important part of the Petersburg tasks was that the member states agreed to deploy their troops and resources from across the whole spectrum of the military under the authority of the W.E.U. in accordance with their obligations under the UN and the North Atlantic Tree. So the W.A.U. became this empowered vehicle to put together a certain task. Now what to do with the W.E.U. was a big question. So in 1996 at NATO's Berlin ministerial meeting, an agreement was reached whereby the W.E.U. would contribute to establishing a European security and defense identity as the so-called European pillar or as a European pillar within NATO structures. So this was a very important compromise done at Berlin in 1996, which allowed the European states through the W.E.U. to access NATO assets and actually it will come back, this whole Berlin arrangement will come back in subsequent years. So moving forward, the E.U. included the Petersburg tasks in the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997. In 1999, it was decided that the role of W.E.U. would be incorporated into the E.U. and then at the same time in 1999 at NATO's historic Washington Summit, which was a very important summit for the joining NATO of a variety of Central and Eastern European states, the NATO allies declared their readiness to, and I'm quoting here from the declaration, to define and adopt the necessary arrangements for ready access by the E.U. to the collective assets and capabilities of the alliance for the operations in which the alliance as a whole is not engaged militarily as an alliance. So in other words, the NATO agreed to make certain NATO assets available in a kind of a variable way to the European Union for certain European Union tasks that didn't necessarily implicate the entire NATO transatlantic grouping. Okay, so this was important because it kind of finally concretized the political agreement and kind of operationalized the political agreement that had been reached back in Berlin in 1996. So that was kind of the real kickoff for institutional relations between NATO and E.U. They were actually formally launched in 2001 with the establishment of joint meetings, including at the level of foreign ministers and particularly ambassadors we often had. I know we have former ambassadors to the to the E.U.'s PSC here. We have these NAC-PSC type meetings. There was an exchange of letters between the NATO Secretary General and the E.U. presidency at the time, defining the scope of cooperation and the modalities of consultation between the two organizations. So that was a kind of an important legal step there. There was then as a result of this actually kind of formal interaction that had just started in 2001. And if you remember 2001 was also a really crucial time for NATO as an alliance because it was the first time that we invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which is the collective security clause after the 9-11 attack. So 2001 was this incredibly formative year for NATO. A lot of people forget that it was actually formative on the NATO E.U. front as well. So in 2002 there was a NATO E.U. declaration on the European Security and Defense Policy which set out the political principles and reaffirmed the fact that the E.U. would get assured access to NATO's planning capabilities for the E.U.'s own military operations. And so a lot of the discussions in the early 2000s, the early aughts, were around how to assure European Union access to NATO capabilities and not just make them have them be possibly available but to be available in an assured way. So this culminated in what we call the Berlin Plus Agreement which was concluded on 17th of March 2003 and which provided the institutional foundations of such cooperation. Maybe as just an aside for the lawyers in the room, it's very interesting to look into the legal nature of the Berlin Plus Agreement. It's kind of the important legal text that underpins the whole, even to this day, NATO E.U. cooperation. And so some scholars have had some views about the nature of the agreement. I'll just leave it at that if you're interested. It bears some close attention. The agreement referred to a comprehensive package of arrangements, exchanges of letters, declarations that were meant to take as a whole the framework for NATO E.U. relations. And indeed the main kind of operational thing was that they would allow the E.U. to use NATO structures, mechanisms and assets to carry out military operations if NATO declined to act. So in the absence of the NATO action, let me just tell you a few other parts of the Berlin Plus Agreement. Part of the reason that I was having that caveat about the nature of the agreement is it's actually a whole bunch of different pieces that are kind of put together into a package. There are, and I think that colleagues from the defense side will know this, that there are terms of reference for using NATO's deputy supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe who is a European for commanding E.U. led operations, which has actually occurred in, for example, in Bosnia now. There's assured E.U. access to NATO's planning capabilities. There's a presumption of availability to the European Union of certain pre-identified NATO assets. So there's not only assured access to planning, but there's actually a presumption of availability of listed things. There are modalities for participation by E.U. staff in planning from NATO's perspectives. It's quite interesting. And then there are further adaptation of NATO's defense planning system to incorporate more comprehensively the availability of forces for E.U. led operations. So this was really a considerable undertaking this package to make NATO assets available to help the European Union and to really not just kind of in the act of a military operation, but in its planning and across the spectrum. This is an important legal note here. The implementation of this package was contingent upon the conclusion of an agreement between the NATO and the E.U. on the security of information, which was eventually concluded in March of 2003 as well. It's an agreement that governs access to exchange and release of classified information between NATO on the one side and the Council of the European Union, the High Representative, the European Commission. And then in 2010 we expanded it in order to cover the EAS as well, the European External Action Service. This is an incredibly important agreement that is really at the heart of NATO E.U. cooperation and it's an area of course of close continuing attention for us. Perhaps the last stop before we get to the present in our little journey is the Lisbon Treaty, which brought about many important changes, including, and this is where I think it's kind of interesting to think about potential for the future here, is including Article 427 of the Treaty on European Union, which is the Mutual Assistance Clause of the T.E.U., which mirrors, in some important ways, the Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. So the text just of that is, if a member of Article 427, if a member state is the victim, if an E.U. member state is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other member states shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all means in their power in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, so I'm self-defense. It's not exactly the same language, but it's similar language to what we have in the North Atlantic Treaty, which says that if an armed attack occurs from 1949, it shall be regarded as an armed attack against all allies and they'll take the necessary steps in order to restore peace and security in the North Atlantic area. So we see the famous Irish Clause and the NATO clauses appear there in Article 427 as well, which is important to help reiterate those principles. But what I think here is quite interesting and it's maybe, especially now that I've found out about this interesting project that's going on here at the Institute about the future of Europe, I think it would be interesting to think about the potential interplay between Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and Article 427 of the TEU. Each of them, I mean it's a little bit difficult because each of them has only been invoked once, so as I said Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, we sometimes also call the Washington Treaty, was invoked after 9-11 and Article 427 of the TEU as you know was invoked by France following the 2015, the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. They're both very flexible provisions in that once triggered they are rather open-ended in terms of what assistance can be brought to bear to help the afflicted state or the victim state and they really do enable a wide range of potential responses. Well I mean it's obvious each has only been invoked once and on different occasions that they've never been invoked at the same time, although this possibility is not excluded. In this case for NATO allies the NATO clause which we call the NATO First Policy would apply, but in such a situation NATO and the EU could contribute each in their own ways to a wide range of areas. So that kind of completes my quick history of the legal framework for NATO-EU cooperation. I just want to say a little bit what we're doing right now. I said that last July in Warsaw the Secretary General Stoltenberg, President Junker signed a joint declaration and that we're in the middle of doing now kind of practical proposals based on the declaration. Let me just give you an idea of some of the things that we're doing and then I'll conclude. Well even before the declaration we were very active NATO and the EU in crisis management and operations particularly in the western Balkans in the 90s and Afghanistan since 9-11. So and at the same time maritime security has become a very fertile area of NATO-EU cooperation. So the NATO and EU naval forces have worked together in counter-piracy missions and then also more interestingly, not more interestingly, but also interestingly they've worked together to help counter the refugee and migration crisis. So I can maybe say a little bit about that because I think it's maybe not an area that people know too much about. In February 2016 NATO defense ministers decided that NATO should try to assist with the growing refugee and migrant crisis in Europe. NATO deployed a maritime force to the GNC, which we call the GNC activity, to conduct reconnaissance monitoring and surveillance of illegal crossings and we were in this regard supporting the Turkish and Greek authorities as well as the EU front-ex. Now this GNC activity was really the hot one hotbed I would say for promoting legal cooperation because in order to enable I was saying what does NATO do? We basically do surveillance that is then passed on to either the coastal states or to front-ex, the EU agency. So we were able to put in place a technical agreement at the operational level to support this work and I think that that's one of those areas actually where we've been able to use the legal instruments to actually really have an impact on European security. I should also flag in the maritime area that NATO leaders have agreed to take on a role in supporting the EU's Operation Sophia which is not in the GNC but is more in the central Mediterranean and we'll see we're sort of figuring out the modalities of how to do that right now and I think that that'll be another area where NATO-EU cooperation will really take off. Let me just point out two other areas where we're working together before I finish here. One is in the area of countering hybrid threats. So those of you who follow debates around hybrid warfare hybrid threats will know that there have been just established at Helsinki a new center a European it's called the European center of excellence for countering hybrid threats it was just inaugurated this month earlier this month but I think it has a potential to be a really excellent focal point for work on the hybrid threats that are facing transatlantic community in the current environment and obviously countering hybrid threats is not just a military issue it's an issue that brings to bear a lot of different things law enforcement counter propaganda education anti radicalization and it's a I think it's a classic area where the different strengths of groupings like NATO and the European Union could really be brought to bear in a kind of interesting and and cooperative way. So keep an eye out for this Helsinki hybrid center as it gets off the ground. Finally we work together closely in the cyber area and maybe that's my last legal point we there's been a last year a very groundbreaking memorandum of understanding that was signed between the computer incident response teams the certs of NATO and the EU in Brussels and actually this has already enabled quite a lot of work to happen to counter various cyber attacks that have happened even over the course of just this year. So I mean to sum up I think in the current strategic environment the EU and NATO are faced with unprecedented challenges and the reality is that neither organization has the full range of tools to address security challenges on its own activities of the two organizations are clearly complementary to each other and EU NATO cooperation is is also a kind of joint work that definitely fits into the current atmosphere in the international community about bird and sharing across the Atlantic cooperation between the two organizations is essential and I would I think this is the moment to to discuss and appreciate this maybe before I move on to your questions I want to just say a word about not really NATO EU cooperation in the sense that I've been talking about here but the issue of the European security and defense or European defense there's there's for example we were discussing the recent white paper that was put out in this regard and the European Union has taken substantial steps there there's a launching of the permanent structured cooperation which is called PESCO as you know there's a European defense fund the EDF the creation of the military planning conduct capability the MPCC and the coordinated annual review on defense the card so a lot is happening in this area right now I just want to clarify that NATO has welcomed these initiatives provided that they're developed in a spirit of coherence complementarity and transparency and in this context the possible modalities for the involvement of non-EU allies within NATO so the North American countries and other players will who do contribute substantially to European defense will be of paramount importance and I actually think that that points to the role of legal arrangements actually not just in regulating the past glories of NATO EU cooperation but actually setting up a good foundation for not only the increased level of ambition that we have nowadays but maybe what is to come so I really do think that the the core principles of the framework which are you know the respect for different policy orientations the respect for different mandates and the enabling of cooperation but at the same time decision-making autonomy and institutional integrity of each organization so working together yet remaining having autonomy provide a solid foundation for this work so I'd be very happy to discuss with you further thank you very much for your attention