Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-13-Speech-2-205"
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"en.20071113.27.2-205"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the European People’s Party and European Democrats Group I would like to welcome the introduction of the Schengen system, and to use the occasion on behalf of the nine new Member States to thank both the German and Portuguese Presidencies, the Council, the Commission and especially Mr Coelho for the enormous amount of work needed to achieve this. I must also mention the efforts of the new Member States, since their work has enabled us to be at this point today.
The free movement of people is one of the four freedoms of the Union. We are now extending this achievement, this new area of freedom to many millions of new Union citizens. This is a joint act by all of us: we Europeans have created this together, and we should be proud of it.
Ladies and gentlemen of the House, I come from a town on the border of Austria and Hungary. For many decades my town, Sopron, was separated from its immediate environment and from Austria by an iron curtain. I have brought in a piece of this iron curtain to Parliament – as I have many other times. It was this iron curtain that made it impossible to exercise freedom in Europe. With the introduction of the Schengen system, we are eliminating the last remnants of it. This piece of iron should remind us that our recent past did not have freedom, and that we should never allow freedom to be taken away from us.
With freedom comes responsibility. The new Member States are taking on the responsibility of guarding the common European external borders rigorously, since the security of all of us depends on this. Furthermore, we must not allow ourselves to undermine widespread social support for the right to move freely. For this reason every citizen of the Union must comply with the laws of the Union; as Commissioner Frattini said just now, freedom of movement does not mean freedom of crime without borders.
Freedom must not and cannot be abused, because that endangers freedom itself and the right to move freely. Nor can we allow certain forces to revitalise the principle of collective guilt, which brings bad memories, so as to undermine the right to move freely. We cannot allow the perpetrators of crimes to go unpunished. For this very reason, I would like to express my thanks again that the Schengen system can be extended to these nine new Member States. This is an historical event."@en1
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