France and PA sign budgetary aid agreement – Press conference – Statement/Non-UN document (exerpts)

Signing of the budgetary aid agreement with the Palestinian Authority

Statements by M. Laurent Fabius, Minister of Foreign Affairs, at his joint press conference
with Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority – excerpts –

I am pleased to sign today, together with the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, an agreement that will make it possible over the next few days to transfer euro10 million to the Palestinian Authority. This is the first instalment of our budgetary aid for 2012.

This aid is a sign of our confidence in the Palestinian Authority with respect to the remarkable reform and transparency efforts it has undertaken since 2007. The results achieved now allow us to say that the Palestinian Authority is ready to establish a functional and viable state, as the international financial organizations and the donor community quite rightly stressed.

France has continuously supported the work carried out by Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. With this contribution she will have paid euro105 million to the Palestinian Authority in budgetary aid alone since the International Donors' Conference for the Palestinian State in Paris in December 2007. She intends to continue her budgetary support for the consolidation of the Palestinian institutions. The French and Palestinian parties agreed that a small portion of the first instalment of the 2012 budgetary aid would be allocated to the Palestinian Authority's priority projects in East Jerusalem and Area C.

Furthermore, France is implementing numerous development projects in the West Bank and Gaza through the French Development Agency (euro88 million since the Donors' Conference) and the cooperation activities of her Consulate General in Jerusalem.

France takes this opportunity to again urge all donors to do more to support the Palestinian Authority at a time when it finds itself in a very precarious financial situation. Israel must also do more to help the Palestinian Authority by allowing it to increase its own revenue and thus reduce its dependency on foreign aid, and by removing the existing constraints on Palestinian economic development, both in the West Bank and in Gaza. (…)