Regional Implementation of the Yamoussoukro Decision
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company, the Maghreb Coast Line, which operated on a limited scale until it was dissolved 1976 because of financial problems. In 1970, the AMU’s Air Transport Committee approved the concept of a jointly owned airline to be known as Air Maghreb. In the railway sector, members proposed a regional project that included the Trans-Maghreb Express, which would link Casablanca, Algiers, and Tunis (Aghrout and Sutton 1990, p. 117). Even though these three initiatives never resulted in sustainable ventures, a meeting of Maghreb transport ministers held in Tripoli in May 1989 resurrected the idea of joint air, land, and rail transport companies (Aghrout and Sutton 1990, p. 136). However, no significant progress was achieved and the idea of creating a joint airline appears to have been abandoned after the bankruptcy of Air Afrique in 2001. The AMU did not consider the liberalization of air transport among member states even though all of them except Morocco were signatory states of the Yamoussoukro Decision. The initiative to liberalize air transport came from neighboring European countries that wanted to harmonize and gradually liberalize transport systems in the Mediterranean region. In a conference in Paris in 1995, the ministers of six western Mediterranean countries (Algeria, France, Italy, Morocco, Spain, and Tunisia) agreed to pursue a joint policy aimed at harmonizing and extending the European transport system with the Maghreb transport system. Concerning air transport, the conference set the objectives at harmonizing air traffic control systems between Europe and the Maghreb and fostering partnerships between the six countries “in the interest of gradual and controlled liberalization of the international air transport sector” (European Conference of Ministers of Transport 1995, pp. 3, 5). The consultations between the Maghreb countries and their European counterparts were eventually elevated to the level of the EU, which began to negotiate air service agreements on behalf of its member states.1 In May 2005, the European Commission began negotiations with Morocco on an open skies agreement. This initiative was widely seen as the test case for the new European aviation policy (European Commission 2005b). After five rounds of negotiations in Rabat, Morocco, an agreement was initialed in Marrakech on 14 December 2005. The open skies agreement has two phases. The first phase grants unrestricted third and fourth freedom rights between any point in Morocco and any point in a country in the EU for both Moroccan and EU carriers. The second phase, which will be instituted once Morocco has implemented the relevant European aviation legislation and regulation, will additionally grant consecutive fifth freedom rights to Moroccan carriers in Europe and to EU carriers “to countries