In the context of the Lisbon Strategy the member states have agreed to significantly increase expenditure for research and development by the year 2010. The EU’s institutions are currently in the process of adopting the 7^th Research Framework Programme and its complementary specific research programmes.

The fortieth anniversary of Vatican II and the lessons that the Church in Europe can take from it in order to address the current crisis in the European Union will provide the main themes for debate during the autumn Plenary Meeting of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) from 16-18 November 2005 in Brussels.

In light of the flagrant human rights abuses at Ceuta and Melilla, six Churches and Christian organisations have written to the Justice and Home Affairs Council, which meets on 12 October, to demand that the European Union lives up to the rhetoric it espouses on human rights and concretises them within its migration and asylum policy.

At the first meeting of its kind, bishops from the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) and from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) came together to reflect upon some of the world’s major problems within the context of the transatlantic relationship. The meeting took place from 21-23 September 2005 in Brussels.

Bishop Josef Homeyer, President of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE), today sent a letter to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President-in-Office of the European Council, to the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Javier Solana, and to the European Commissioner for Enlargement, Olli Rehn, alerting them to the imprisonment of Archbishop Jovan Vraniskovski of Ochrid and the Metropolitan of Skopje on 26 July 2005 in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).