The EU’s Political and Security Committee has today appointed Erik Høeg, a Danish diplomat, as new Head of the European Union monitoring mission in Georgia, EUMM Georgia. Erik Høeg succeeds Kęstutis Jankauskas (of Lithuanian nationality) who held the post for more than two and a half years. Erik Høeg is currently serving as Deputy Head of EUMM and has been Acting Head of mission since 1 September 2017.
The EUMM was deployed in September 2008 following the EU-brokered Six Point Agreement which ended the August war between Russia and Georgia. It contributes to stabilisation, normalisation and confidence building between the conflict parties. The mission provides civilian monitoring of parties’ actions, including full compliance with the Six-Point Agreement and subsequent implementing measures throughout Georgia. It also informs European policy in support of a durable political solution for Georgia.
The main tasks of the civilian mission EUMM Georgia are the following:
- Stabilisation: monitoring the situation of the stabilisation process . The mission operates a ‘hotline’ to deal with incidents;
- Normalisation: monitoring the normalisation process between the conflict parties and how people are affected;
- Confidence building: contributing to the reduction of tensions through liaison, facilitation of contacts between parties and joint projects;
- Contributing to informing European policy regarding the conflict.
EUMM’s contribution to the relative stability on the ground remains key. EUMM has successfully launched a number of small confidence building projects under its new facility and will increase those. It has also seen an important positive development with the resumption of the incident prevention and response mechanism in Gali. The mission is headquartered in Tbilisi and has three field offices in Gori, in Mtskheta and in Zugdidi. The mission started on 1 October 2008 and deploys 200 EU monitors.
The European Union continues to fully support Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders. The EU actively supports conflict resolution efforts through the work of EUMM but also the EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus (EUSR) and his co-chairmanship of the Geneva International Discussions to which EUMM participates.
More – see official website of European Council
