Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-11-20-Speech-3-234"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20021120.5.3-234"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, last week in the EU-Lithuania Joint Parliamentary Committee we had an in-depth and critical discussion of the solution arrived at for Kaliningrad. Mr Haarder called the solution ‘balanced’, but I regard it as being, above all, balanced in terms of allowing Russia to save face and to please our own Schengen purists.
The Commissioner has told us that the European Union needs to secure its borders at all times and in all places. That is a statement that even Erich Honecker could have signed up to, because transit through Lithuania will be more difficult for passengers than transit from West Germany to west Berlin via East Germany was in the old days. I think the European Union should be hanging its head in shame to have agreed to this thirteen years after the wall came down.
The practical difficulties will be a matter for the Lithuanian border authorities and the passengers themselves. Russia will be able to exploit this situation for other purposes as well, because of the enormous potential for technical problems and the likelihood that those affected will complain.
Have you ever considered that the eastern end of these journeys is not in Russia at all, but in Belarus, a country that has not been mentioned in these discussions at all? So what would happen if relations between Russia and Mr Lukashenko deteriorated to the point that Mr Lukashenko decided to exploit this situation? The whole arrangement would then not even be worth the paper it was written on.
We can also easily imagine what will happen in practice when an application is made for a facilitated rail travel document. In an extreme case someone in Khabarovsk in eastern Russia would have to give his address with his ticket in the hope that everything would be forwarded to a central Russian office which would then send everything on to the Lithuanian authorities, which would in turn have to process everything on time, so that when the passenger on board the train arrives at the border the Lithuanian border official would hopefully have the transit permit for that passenger with him. However, it is all too easy to imagine how well all this will work in practice, given the administrative capacity of the Russian authorities. I therefore urge you to keep an eye on this problem and not to imagine that we can now assume that it has been dealt with."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples