Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-12-13-Speech-1-098"
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"en.20101213.16.1-098"2
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"Madam President, I would like to thank the honourable Members for this debate. I fully agree with you that visa facilitation and visa liberalisation is a very strong tool for increasing people-to-people contact. Not only ordinary citizens, students, tourists; it also increases business possibilities and that is a very good thing.
Overall, I think that this was a very good debate. I am looking forward to reporting to you on the evaluation of the readmission agreement. They are indeed very hard to negotiate, Mr Busuttil, but we are working on it. As I said earlier in this debate, there will be an evaluation at the beginning of next year and I will be happy to come to Parliament and to discuss its conclusions and how we can move further in facilitating these kinds of agreements with third countries.
We have decided in the European Union to move towards visa liberalisation with the Western Balkans. That in itself is a political decision. It shows political will, and that is very important, but the achievement of this goal can only be very technical and very strict. We cannot abolish visas unless we have very strict criteria.
These criteria are open. They are transparent. They are the same for everybody and they are bringing about important reforms in the countries that want to achieve visa facilitation and visa liberalisation. And yes, Mr Busuttil, the Commission does monitor this very closely and the expert missions are composed also of experts from Member States. All these reports and all this work is done in a very transparent way.
Having said that, there have been a few cases of abuse, notably in Serbia and in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Now, this should not overshadow that overwhelmingly; it works well, but there are abuses. The Commission has addressed that. We have been there. We have talked to our interlocutors. The Belgian Presidency has been very active.
We are trying to assess this problem. It is mainly a small group of criminal networks that encourage people in remote areas to travel to the European Union under false premises in the hope that they will receive asylum. We will, of course, examine all these applications on an individual basis, but very many of them are unfounded and this is why we need to address these networks. This is being done and we are in dialogue with the authorities from these countries.
I was personally in Tirana and in Sarajevo only a month ago, together with the Belgian Minister, in order to reinforce this message, that this is very important but beware of abuses. We said it to all the Ministers, to members of the parliament, members of civil society, the universities and, I think, all the TV channels that we could find in these countries, in order to make it very clear that this is a fantastic opportunity but please do not abuse it.
We have an evaluation and monitoring mechanism in place and I will be happy to report to you later this spring on how it is working.
On Russia, this has indeed led to a lot of good things, to increased mobility between our countries. According to all evaluations, confirmed by Member States, there are no signals that the visa facilitation has led to any increased security threats or to increased irregular immigration. We are now identifying a list of common steps for Russia and the European Union to take in order to open possibilities for further talks on moving towards visa liberalisation.
On Georgia, I just want to reiterate to my Green friends what the rapporteur has also said, that they have acceded to the Council of Europe and the European Convention of Human Rights on the readmission agreement. EU laws also require Member States to individually assess an asylum application and, should there be a need for international protection, they must, under EU law, respect that and also the principle of non-refoulement, that is, not to return a person to a country if there is a possibility that this person will be subjected to persecution or serious harm."@en1
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