Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-06-13-Speech-2-199"

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"Mr President, I shall deal only with the visa agreement. We say that we want to simplify visa procedures, but on closer inspection of the bilateral agreement between the EU and Russia, it becomes apparent that there are, in fact, very few simplifications associated with the agreement. The agreement will affect only a small percentage of travellers. Although the groups involved are important ones, such as students, participants in organised programmes and business travellers, the question must be asked as to what the situation is for other groups, in other words for the great majority who really would benefit from seeing something of the world. Is it desirable to be categorising people in the modern world? For the average traveller, that is to say for more than 90% of those wanting to travel, the agreement will provide no simplifications at all. It will still, for example, be impossible to make a private car journey to Russia. This is because the jungle-like mess of requirements relating to invitations and mandatory registrations is not going to be overhauled. It will also remain unclear how the introduction of what are known as biometric data is to be linked to the visa procedure. For me, it is a mystery why this agreement has not been linked to the international Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. Every year, for example, a number of children are abducted to Russia from my home country, Finland, in each case by the Russian half of the parental couple. There is no legal recourse for bringing the children back home to the other parent. All this is obvious. We in the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe hope for a sympathetic hearing for these concerns from the other groups. A chimera of an agreement will always be just that – this needs to be said loud and clear. The agreement makes a difference to too few people and does not sufficiently simplify the actual visa process. This problem applies both to those people wanting to travel to Russia and to those wanting to enter the Schengen area. To simply blame the weak result on the Russians is not the job of this Parliament. We must be able to assess the whole picture and set goals for social intercourse with our neighbours. That is the task for which we were elected."@en1

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