This WEEK in the European Union

ANDREW RETTMAN

08.07.2006 @ 11:32 CET

EUOBSERVER / WEEKLY AGENDA (10 - 16 July) - Russia's G8 summit is the big event this week, with Putin, Bush, Blair, Merkel, Chirac and Prodi on the guest list and with big topics such as energy security, nuclear proliferation and the global HIV situation on the agenda.

The 15-17 July meeting in the Constantine Palace outside St Petersburg will see the west seek access to Russia's oil and gas markets and a common line on Iran and North Korea, while debating if China, India and the EU should also join the club.

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After the degradations of the 1990s, Russia will be keen to show it has become a modern superpower or "sovereign democracy" - subservient to nobody but open to market economy-type reforms and a team player in global diplomacy projects.

But opposition figures such as chess champion Gary Kasparov will lead protests against Russian political repression and human rights abuses in the run-up to the summit, with reports indicating that a 20,000-strong security force has already begun to crack down on would-be demonstrators.

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and Finnish EU president Matti Vanhannen will also make a beeline to St Petersburg for talks, while Kazakhstan leader Nursultan Nazarbayev will speak on behalf of the post-Soviet CIS countries.

The summit falls just as the EU is starting secretive internal talks on a post-2007 energy and security pact with Russia and with Helsinki planning to make better EU-Russia relations a key theme of its EU presidency despite uneasiness in some new member states.

Finland comes to Brussels

The fresh Finnish presidency will also send a bushel of cabinet ministers to set out details of its programme to parliamentary committees in Brussels this week, with foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja before the foreign affairs committee on Wednesday.

EU finance ministers will on Tuesday formally endorse Slovenia's 2007 eurozone entry with a celebratory party in the European Commission on Thursday. The Tuesday meeting will be broadcast live on the internet under new transparency measures agreed in June.

New Italian foreign minister Massimo D'Alemo will find it hard to avoid the subject of Italy's collusion in CIA kidnappings while meeting external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Wladner and home affairs man Franco Frattini on Wednesday.

Azerbaijan oil minister Husein Bagirov will also drop into Brussels on Wednesday, as energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs goes out to Ceyhan, Turkey the same day to cut a ribbon on the new BTC oil pipeline shipping Azerbaijan's oil to Europe.

Africa comes to Europe

Further afield, Ms Ferrero-Waldner and Mr Frattini will on Monday take part in a minister-level EU-Africa conference on immigration in Rabat, Morocco as Spain, Italy and Malta struggle to cope with the flow of African desperadoes across the Mediterranean sea.

Communications commissioner Margot Wallstrom will on Wednesday take the commission's popularity roadshow - the plan D tour - to Scotland for a string of public debates with a youth and culture focus.

Back in Brussels, the Court of Auditors will tell MEPs in the budget control committee on Thursday what it thinks about EU translation and interpretation costs and the environmental fall-out from EU projects in the third world.

Old ghosts

Meanwhile, old ghosts will haunt the EU courts in Luxembourg on Tuesday morning as judges give their final verdict in the case of Edith Cresson.

The former commissioner and French prime minister is synonymous with EU fraud - famously paying her dentist €250,000 of EU taxpayers' cash for bogus research - and helped bring down the Santer commission in 1999.

A February opinion by advocate general Leendert Adrie Geelhoed suggested the court strips Ms Cresson of 50 percent of her EU pensions rights.