Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-14-Speech-2-168"
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"en.20020514.9.2-168"2
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". – Mr President, there are all too many things I have to apologise for, and one of them is that I am not Commissioner Vitorino. I am standing in for him this afternoon – insofar as that is possible – because he is attending an important meeting in Canada.
Over Easter I was in China and was able to take further the discussions that we had begun, thanks to the initiative taken by Zhu Rongji on how we can assist to develop programmes in China, which will make it less likely that people will put themselves into the hands of those who seek to move other human beings around the world, sometimes with fatal consequences, as we saw at Dover a couple of years ago.
We have been very impressed by the positive way in which the Chinese authorities, led, I repeat by Mr Zhu Rongji, have responded to our own ideas, and I hope that we will have in place shortly some viable programmes in areas such as information and training, which will help to deal with a very serious problem for China and for us as well. This is, of course, a model for what we want to do in other places.
In the field of re-admission, the Commission is about to finalise an agreement with Sri Lanka. This is the second agreement at Community level of this kind, the first one, I am delighted to say, having being concluded with Hong Kong. The Commission will continue its efforts to achieve the other agreements for which it has the mandate to negotiate and will table the necessary proposals to extend this approach in as coherent a manner as possible.
Finally, in line with its communications concerning the introduction of open methods of coordination both for immigration and asylum, the Commission will shortly propose the implementation of a European system of information exchange on migration, asylum and countries of origin, as called for by the European Council. The new action plan on statistics requested by the Council in May of last year, the development of the activities of a virtual European Observatory on migration and the take-over of the Council committee on exchange of information activities by the Commission will all be developed.
With regard to the extremely important question of the integration of migrants, the Commission wants to complement the instruments which have been developed in the fight against discrimination and racism with some new specific initiatives in this field. This is an exceptionally important area for us and we should not have needed recent electoral manifestations in order to convince us of the importance of this subject.
Once again, I want to thank Parliament for allowing me to fill in for my colleague. I say, as a fellow Commissioner, that all of us in the Commission are very well aware of the enormous importance of this subject politically, and I am certainly aware of its enormous importance in the discharge of my principal responsibilities in the area of external relations.
I am pleased to have the opportunity to take part in this debate, firstly because we know, as politicians, how important and sensitive all these issues are and how they require honest, transparent and constructive debate and discussion. Secondly, because there is a close connection, as the Vice-President has just made clear, between external relations policy and immigration – both legal immigration and illegal trafficking in human beings – and related issues. Those were issues that we managed with strong leadership from the Spanish presidency to discuss at the recent meeting of the Mediterranean partners in Valencia, and I shall come back to them later. I was able to discuss these issues as well myself on a recent visit to the People's Republic of China.
The Commission very much welcomed the conclusions adopted at the Laeken European Council and especially the confirmation of its commitment to the policy guidelines and objectives defined in 1999 in the second semester at Tampere. The Commission supports the new impetus to reduce the backlog in the fields of immigration and asylum legislation defined in the scoreboard which was established to review progress on the creation of an area of "freedom, security and justice". We are delighted that the Spanish presidency has given a new dynamism to this process.
It is worthwhile recalling that the main proposals necessary for the implementation of Article 63 of the Treaty and the Tampere conclusions are already on the table. Therefore it is mainly up to the Council to speed up its work. The political agreement at the last Justice and Home Affairs Council on the proposal on laying down minimum standards for the reception of applicants for asylum in the Member States signified the start of much-needed movement in this direction. The Commission is once again grateful for the efforts of the Spanish presidency.
Negotiations are under way regarding two other legislative proposals on asylum, namely a Council Regulation on criteria and a mechanism for establishing responsibility for examining asylum applications to replace the Dublin Convention, as well as a Council directive on the qualification and status of persons as refugees or as beneficiaries of subsidiary protection. The Commission will also pursue the implementation of the Eurodac system as quickly as possible in the hope that Member States will soon make the necessary provisions to take part.
As for the other subjects under discussion, the Commission will continue to contribute to the follow-up and the outcome of all these debates. In that sense, we warmly welcomed the rapid adoption of the Action Plan on the fight against illegal migration and human trafficking, which was based on our communication. As promised, the Commission will swiftly take the necessary steps to ensure its implementation. The first initiatives have already been taken, as the Commission has adopted the Green Paper on a Community return policy on illegal residents. In view of the highly complex nature and sheer scale of this phenomenon, the primary aim of the Green Paper is to launch a debate and to sound out all the interested parties. The Commission has also recently launched a communication on the integrated management of the European Union’s external borders. This issue will be considered on a Community-wide basis rather than as a set of national systems and will, I very much hope, map out the route to the longer-term objective of setting up a European corps of border guards or police.
Furthermore, following the Laeken invitation, the Commission tabled a new amended proposal on family reunification on 2 May in order to make it easier to find a consensus on this extremely sensitive issue. As also requested by the Laeken Summit, the Commission will also shortly bring forward an amended proposal for a Council directive on minimum standards on procedures for granting and withdrawing refugee status.
Furthermore, the Commission supported the willingness expressed in Laeken to better integrate migration policy with the external policy of the Union. It would therefore welcome any initiative aimed at giving a new perspective to the High Level Working group on Asylum and Immigration that was created by the Council in 1999. Its mandate merits an update so that it is brought into line with the current situation. The Commission intends to present a proposal of programme cooperation with third countries before the end of the year. It will be based on the experience gleaned from the implementation of the new budgetary instrument created by the European Parliament.
I just want to say how much importance both António Vitorino and I attach to this particular issue: the relationship between the subjects we are debating this afternoon and external policy. There is plainly an intimate connection between our success, for example, in promoting sustainable development and demographic pressures. There is clearly an important role for us to play in helping other countries to deal with illegal trafficking in human beings, which is just as much a threat and, in some cases, a greater threat to them than it is to those richer countries which are the targets for those who traffic in human beings."@en1
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