Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-06-16-Speech-1-145"
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"en.20080616.22.1-145"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, as Mrs Gebhardt mentioned, celebrating forty years of the Customs Union makes people aware that the European Union has honoured part of the pledge it made forty years ago. In the intervening years – and my political group, Commissioner, has supported all the legislative proposals you have presented to the European Parliament in recent months – the Customs Union has protected the financial interests of the European Community and its Member States far more effectively than the Member States alone could have done. It has facilitated cross-border investments within the Union in a way that the Member States could not have managed to do if left to their own devices. By modernising the Customs Code and introducing the electronic customs system, to which you referred, we have done a great deal to ensure that such investment activity will be further simplified in future. I must add, however, that businesses have been left to bear the cost of conversion, and that is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. I believe the customs system faces formidable challenges in the coming years. That is why I believe it is important, Commissioner, that your strategy addresses these challenges efficiently and effectively and provides responses.
In my constituency, as you know, there is a problem with customs clearance at the Swiss border. I hope we can continue in future to resolve the many little questions of detail that confront our businesses from day to day as constructively as we have managed to do in the past.
Over the next few years – and this is the challenge to which your strategy must respond – the customs system will have to focus far more sharply on the security interests of the European Union than it has had to do in the past. This, of course, includes protection against counterfeit products and piracy, but there is an increasing need to create even closer links between the tasks of the customs service and aspects of the fight against global terrorism. In the realm of global trade, as Mrs Fortou pointed out, there will be an increasing need to deliberate, within the WTO and at other levels, on ways in which customs administrations can play an effective role in the protection of external borders.
My last point is that blanket scanning does not seem practical from our perspective in the light of the concept of a single transatlantic market. I wish you continuing success."@en1
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