Giles Merritt, Co-founder & Director of the Security & Defence Agenda (SDA), is among Brussels’ most influential commentators on EU issues. He has been a pioneer of the public policy debate on Europe’s future, both as a journalist and think-tanker. Merritt is also the head of the SDA’s sister think-tank Friends of Europe, whose debates and reports cover the whole spectrum of non-defence topics of interest to EU-level policymakers, researchers and stakeholders. In addition, he is the Editor of the new policy journal Europe’s World launched in 2005 as an EU-wide platform for debate.

Merritt’s work with think-tanks began in the mid-1980s, when he devised and chaired a series of Business Policy Seminars on behalf of the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). He went on to act as Moderator at the French-language debates organised by the Club de Bruxelles, and at many of the conferences held by Aspen Institute Italia. In 1992, he accepted an invitation to be the director of the new Philip Morris Institute for Public Policy Research (PMI), and was responsible for the highly successful series of quarterly Discussion Papers that PMI produced until its closure in 1999. Merritt’s backgrounds as a journalist and commentator has been crucial to the success of the organisations he leads. From 1968-83, Giles Merritt was a staff correspondent of the Financial Times and reported successively from London, Paris, Belfast/Dublin and Brussels. From 1984 to the present day he has contributed columns on EU matters to the Op-Ed pages of the International Herald Tribune, and his articles range widely over political and economic issues.

Geert Cami co-founded the SDA in 2002. He had been Managing Director of Forum Europe since 1996. Before coming to Forum Europe, Geert Cami worked for the European Commission’s Humanitarian Office as Deputy to the Information Counsellor. Geert Cami has also been a freelancer for two informational music programmes with Belgian Radio & Television (now VRT). During his military service, he worked as a journalist at Televox where he contributed to bi-monthly television news reports, broadcast in Germany, with regular co-productions with the national television stations BRTN and RTBF. He also produced a 26-minute report in English for WEU, CSCE and NATO. In 2002, Geert Cami and Giles Merritt launched the New Defence Agenda (now the Security & Defence Agenda) as a neutral platform for discussing security and defence issues on a regular basis with all actors (international organisations, national governments, business, other think-tanks or foundations, NGOs and media. Geert Cami is also the co-founder and Director of Friends of Europe, the Brussels-based think tank for EU policy analysis and debate. Friends of Europe is presided over by former European Commission Vice-President Etienne Davignon and has 55 European personalities on its Board of Trustees, including Javier Solana, Pascal Lamy, Pat Cox, Jean-Luc Dehaene.