Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-23-Speech-3-053"
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"en.20080423.3.3-053"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, you have presented us with the infamous Twin-Track Visa Waiver Program. According to it, the USA is to make visa exemption a privilege and will ratify the special requirements to be imposed on Greece and the new Member States, which will have to provide, with a European stamp of approval, of course, even more sensitive passenger data than universally required in theory by the PNR. There will even be immediate access to citizens’ criminal records. Your answer is that this is not a matter of Community competence and that each Member State should act as it wishes. In other words, you are leaving half the Member States exposed to brutal threats for the surrender of personal data, which the USA does not require from the other half of Member States. In any case, this has been said more plausibly but also more cynically by Mr Rosenzweig, the US Assistant Secretary involved. He said in the US Senate on 28 February:
‘The eight aspirant countries [...] have strong incentives to commit to implementing the full suite of security standards’.
In other words, these are countries are so desperate for visas that we can force them to accept anything.
Commissioner, according to the letter and spirit of Europe’s Common Visa Policy, however, the current visa or non-visa status does not merely have to be given to everyone; all citizens have a right to it under the same terms. The USA has been politically strong enough to remove the Common European Policy. Unfortunately, at the Council and the Commission you have not had the political will to stop them."@en1
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