Petersberg tasks

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The Petersberg tasks are a list of military and security priorities incorporated within the European Security and Defence Policy of the European Union.

The Petersberg tasks were first fomulated by the Western European Union (WEU) in 1992 during a summit in at the Hotel Petersberg near Bonn. In 1997, during the European summit in Amsterdam, the tasks were incorporated in the Treaty on European Union. Both the WEU and the EU are empowered to enforce the Petersberg tasks, but with the transfer of the most important WEU assets to the EU in 1999, this distinction is mostly artificial.

The Petersberg tasks cover great range of possible military missions, ranging from the most simple to the most robust military intervention. They are formulated as:

Humanitarian and rescue tasks
Peacekeeping tasks
Tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking.

Officially, the range of tasks the EU commits itself "includes" these tasks, but is not limited by them. In practice, the task of territorial defence is considered the domain of NATO. As many European countries are fervent supporters of NATO, there are many provisions to prevent competition with NATO.