On Monday, 31 May, Mr Gundars Daudze, Speaker of the Saeima of the Republic of Latvia, and Mr John Tanner, President of the NATO PA, inaugurated a flowerbed arranged in the form the NATO PA Riga Session logo in Jēkaba Square.

Mr. G.Daudze indicated that Latvia did its best to make sure that the NATO PA Riga Session proceeds flawlessly. “Today we want to give a lasting present to the inhabitants and guests of Riga,” said the Speaker of the Saeima at the ceremony dedicated to the new flowerbed arranged in the colours of NATO’s logo and Latvia’s flag.

„It clearly symbolises our close and constructive cooperation, as well as the fact that Latvia is a full-fledged NATO member state which is aware of its friends, partners and allies,” emphasised Mr G.Daudze.

On 1 June, the last day of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s (PA) Riga Session will end with the plenary session.

The plenary meeting will be opened by Mr. John Tanner, President of the NATO PA. Then the participants of the plenary meeting will be addressed by Mr. Gundars Daudze, Chairman of the Saeima, and Mr. Valdis Dombrovskis, Prime Minister of Latvia. It has been planned that Mr. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO Secretary General, General Abdul Rahim Vardak, Defence Minister of Afghanistan, and General Egon Ramms, Commander of the Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum, will also take the floor.

Riga, May 30 2010 – A ceremony to mark the donation of books by 18 member-country parliaments and associates of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly to the Latvian National Library, which is at the building planning stage at present, was a feature of the Assembly’s Spring Session meetings on Sunday. 

Although the library will not open until 2012, these books will be presented next week at an exhibition at which they will be made available to students, to academics and to the general public.

In preparation for the Session, parliamentarians had been invited by the Latvian delegation to present the new library with books dealing with international security and military and geostrategic issues, and on the history of NATO.

A political and social analysis of the Greek financial crisis can shed new light on its causes and consequences, delegates at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly heard on Saturday. 
“My own understanding of the current crisis is that it is primarily a political one,” said Spyros Economides, senior lecturer in International Relations and European Politics at the London School of Economics.
The root causes go back to attitudes towards the state, and political weaknesses at the European level, he told the Economics and Security Committee at the Assembly’s Spring Session in Riga.  
Greece’s deficit currently stands at 14 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), while its debt-to-GDP ratio is 115 per cent. The European Union (EU) has undertaken to provide 80 billion euros as part of a bailout plan, which also includes 30 billion euros from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).