The Editorial

Claudio Lenoci
Director, ILO Office
for Italy and San Marino

The meeting of ILO European Directors will take place this year in Rome, at a time when our Organization is reflecting on new perspectives for the future. Our Director General has quite rightly pointed out that United Nations reform demands parallel initiatives within the multilateral system, at country level, in the donor countries system, and, above all, while building synergy and integration among United Nations system agencies.

The ILO has already followed this strategy by signing an agreement with the UNDP last February, in accordance with the “delivering as one” model advocated in the report by the high-level panel on United Nations system-wide coherence, published in 2006. Several other initiatives, taken even before 2006, follow the same line, for instance the ILO-FAO agreement.

In this context, I would recall the importance of the United Nations agricultural pole in Rome, which comprises the FAO, IFAD and the WFP, considering that these United Nations institutions might become valuable interlocutors in setting up Decent Work Country Programmes.

The synergy and strategic integration called for by the reform of the United Nations system should also work at our own level and help to achieve a common dimension in the action of our European offices within a more European perspective.

In this regard, the future of the International Training Centre in Turin, a centre of excellence for training, highly appreciated by the Italian authorities, as acknowledged by the Italian President during his visit to the Centre in October 2006, deserves great attention from our European offices and a strong commitment to improving the training capacity of the ILO and of the whole United Nations system.

This year, as in previous years, the agenda fixed by our Director Friedrich Buttler, will include a discussion of the priorities indicated by the Presidency of the EU. Successive EU Presidencies have converged more and more on a certain number of core issues. This is why the Italian Labour Minister devoted his contribution to “fle­xicurity”, an issue which is gaining relevance in the Eu­ropean debate on employment, and to the need for single States to adopt better harmonized measures in favour of decent work, measures that would reconcile the demands of the market with the protection of individual rights.