The Mediterranean Commission dates from October 12, 1990 when, with the impetus of Raoul Legier and Eugenio Gay Deans at the time of Marseille and Barcelona, the 1st MEDITERRANEAN ASSIZES was celebrated in Aix-en-Provence with a suggestive theme: Seeking common law in Southern Europe.

The project’s fundamental goal is to guarantee exchange between lawyers from all Mediterranean shores, an objective that the FEB incorporated into its own Statutes when it was created in 1992.

The FEB, the Federation of European Bars, is an organization formed by local and national Bars and law societies from European Council Member States. Aside from the Bars and law societies from southern Europe included in the FEB, many Bars and law societies from the Southern and Eastern Shores of the Mediterranean fully, actively and regularly participate in the Commission’s works.

The special characteristics of the Commission explain that the FEB Statutes foresee that the Mediterranean Technical Secretary falls under the authority of the Secretariat of the Presidency and not the Secretariat of Commissions. Said another way, the Mediterranean Commission, by its character and composition is the only FEB Commission with its own Statutes. The FEB makes the Mediterranean Commission become “more than a Commission” due to its own characteristics.

Along with the bars and law societies driving this Commission, as Marseille and Barcelona have done, add to these those that are ready like Valencia, Naples, Montpellier, Trani, Alicante, including Oporto and, by far, Genoa, Ceuta, Taormina, Aix-en-Provence, Perpignan, Malaga, Nimes, Paris or Madrid, the role of the Bars and law societies which do not belong to the FEB, like the Casablanca Bar which has known to play a determinant role, stand out. Other Bars and law societies like Algiers, Istanbul, Beirut, Meknes, Tunis, Marrakech, Libya or from Egypt, are regulars in the Commission’s work meetings and its ASSIZES, traditional Commission meetings that occur on alternate different shores for 2 or 3 days around some question of legal and social transcendence with the goal to approximate legal traditions and practices towards a Mediterranean community wherein law is founded on the social project that constitutes the Union for the Mediterranean with full recognition of a person’s dignity as the last and necessary subject of legal order and assists in the creation of spaces for peace and liberty. Thanks to the celebration of these Assizes, legal institutions, children of the Commission, were created with full autonomy and render great services to Mediterranean society like OGIM (Osservatorio Giuridico Internazionale sulla Migrazione) with its main headquarters in Trani, the Hispanic-Arab Forum of Jurists with the Hispano-Morrocco Court of Arbitrage with headquarters in Casablanca and Madrid; the Foundation for Legal Studies of Mediterranean Tourism with a headquarters in Malaga.

The Commission is aware that union in the Mediterranean and, as such, the political project of the Union for the Mediterranean will not advance without the creation of a real space for peace and prosperity in the area and, by it, on a professional level, within the scope of the law societies and the bars, the Commission seeks to play a role to facilitate approximation and coexistence among all the bars and law societies, especially the Israeli and Palestinian ones which contribute to the necessary pacification of the zone.

– Francisco PUCHOL-QUIXAL