Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-11-Speech-3-315"
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Mr President, I wish to confirm what Mr Vondra has said. I must also add that, together with Mr Langer, the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Interior, we have made an absolute priority of this SIS II issue.
The current difficulties facing SIS II were discussed at the informal meeting of the ministers on 15 January and at the Justice and Home Affairs Council of 26 and 27 February. The broad outlines of the approach recommended by the Commission for the continuation of SIS II were accepted.
Firstly, the need to continue with the feasibility study into an alternative technical solution based on the current SIS I+ received support from the Council. We are therefore able to continue this feasibility study into an alternative solution.
However, any alternative technical solution will obviously have to comply with the legal framework created for SIS II, as adopted by Parliament and by the Council. Obviously, great care will need to be taken with regard to the maximum re-use of the investments, as well as to the situation of the Member States and associated countries that intend to become a part of the Schengen area in the years to come.
The ministers decided to re-convene, as has just been said, in June at the latest – at the start of June – in order to assess the progress made and to define, where necessary, new directions and any changeover to an alternative option. In the light of this, the Council has asked the Presidency and the Commission, in close cooperation with the SIS II Task Force and in consultation with the appropriate bodies, to present the Council with a report containing a detailed assessment and comparison of the two scenarios. This report is to be produced as soon as possible, and by no later than May 2009.
To this end, common comparison criteria have been agreed on for the purposes of assessing the respective advantages and disadvantages of each solution. For clarity’s sake, this means that we will have a Council decision at the start of June. The latter will be taken in light of the tests that will have been completed and this, we believe, will make it possible either to carry on with SIS II or to move towards an alternative solution, but one that will, of course, still fulfil the objectives that you have set.
I am, of course, very aware of what Mr Coelho and Mrs Roure said about the need for a high level of transparency. I would like to say that we send, and will continue to send, the minutes of the SIS II committee on a very regular basis. I must also say that I have written to Mr Deprez, the chairman of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, to provide him with detailed information on the situation with SIS II. A copy of this correspondence has also been sent to Mr Coelho.
I also wish to say to Mr Lax that the problems with SIS II do not affect VIS. The problems with SIS II do not involve the infrastructure that it shares with VIS. It can be said that VIS is going very much according to the plan agreed with the Member States.
What I wish to say to you is that we have in fact organised, both with the Task Force and within the Commission, extremely regular meetings with the co-contractor and the two co-contractors, especially Steria. We can truly hope, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, that this issue will be concluded in the coming months, with this decision on a final date, set as the start of June, when the Council will, in fact, have to make its decision.
I undertake here and now to keep Parliament abreast of all of these developments.
I am going to try, in turn, to give you some clarifications. The Commission’s main contractor for developing SIS II has performed a series of operational tests on the central system running interactively with some national systems. Between November and December 2008, the results of these tests led us to conclude that the central system had not achieved the level stipulated in the contract.
In mid-November, the Commission initiated a detailed analysis of the SIS II solution, which is currently being developed by Hewlett-Packard/Steria, in cooperation with experts from the Member States, and with the help and assistance of two well-known IT consultancies.
Following the failure of the operational tests, we then implemented an analysis and repair plan that will take an estimated four months to complete. The objective of this plan is to bring the implementation of SIS II up to a satisfactory level of stability and performance.
The aim of the plan is, firstly, to fix the known bugs linked to the central system – some of the bugs have already been fixed – and, secondly, to verify that the implementation of SIS II is not suffering from insurmountable structural weaknesses.
Targeted tests are being performed in a number of priority areas to remove the uncertainties surrounding the architecture of the current solution. This activity is running in parallel with the finalisation of the technical analysis of the underlying problems.
The Commission has also introduced a global approach to the management of the project so that the central and national components of SIS II can be better integrated, in accordance with the competences legally established by the Commission and the Member States.
In concrete terms, the Commission is coordinating a joint management structure for the project. This joint management structure brings together the national project managers, the central project managers and the Commission’s contractors. This structure will accompany the project throughout the analysis and repair phase, then during the qualification tests, then during the migration phase, until SIS II is commissioned.
At the end of the analysis and repair phase, we will have a precise idea of the resources that still need to be implemented before SIS II can be started up and of the corresponding schedule, as Mr Vondra just said. Obviously, there is no doubt that the objective of bringing SIS II into service in September 2009 will be subject to delay."@en1
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