Madam President, Commissioner Vitorino, ladies and gentlemen, in 1990 the Schengen Agreement was signed and the need was acknowledged to step up controls in order to prevent threats to our citizens’ security, such as organised crime, terrorism, trafficking in human beings and drugs and illegal immigration, amongst others, from entering the Community. Applying the principle of free movement and abolishing controls at national borders has heightened the importance of controls at our external borders. We know that free movement within the territory of the Schengen States is a freedom that in return requires not only a strengthening of our external borders but also a rapid and efficient exchange of information under border controls and police cooperation. In this context, the Schengen Information System (SIS) has played quite an important role, which we are attempting to extend even further by creating a second generation of the SIS that has been designed for SIS II. The SIS operates as an information system that enables the competent authorities in the Member States to investigate and receive alerts on persons and on objects. The system currently operates in thirteen Member States and in two other States - Iceland and Norway - and it is hoped that it will soon become partially operational in the United Kingdom and in Ireland. The SIS is the largest database in Europe and has a dual function: it contributes to maintaining public order and security and to immigration, by supporting the measures intended to compensate for the free movement of persons. The proposals presented to us for the creation of SIS II are intended to extend the system’s capacity and to introduce new technical and research possibilities, taking advantage of the most up-to-date developments in the field of information technology. The Council’s plan is that the system should be up and running in 2006. This new system is being created in order to address three major issues. Firstly, enlargement, so as to be able to integrate the new Member States, which will require the capacity to integrate more users, more Member States, and also new categories of users. There is already agreement in Council on allowing new authorities to access SIS, but it is not yet known what these authorities will be. The second development is that the current system has functions covering two categories of information (persons and objects). The intention is not only to increase the number of data categories that will be included, that is, new objects and functions, but also to increase the capacity to process this information, to interlink alerts, to modify the duration of the alerts, and to store and transfer biometric data, especially photographs and fingerprints. The Council has taken no decision on what new categories of objects or persons will be included. The third and last issue – that of economy – is that, despite having more functions and more users, the system must be more homogeneous, more flexible, more secure and perform better. It must also be manageable and cost-effective. We are, therefore, right to consider that we are no longer talking only about a limited measure of compensation, introduced to facilitate the free movement of persons, as set out in the Schengen Convention, in Articles 92 and 102 to be specific. Indeed, a document issued by the Presidency in February 2002 even suggested that the SIS could be used for the purpose of police information in the broadest sense. The nature of the SIS consequently underwent a metamorphosis, albeit an imperceptible one; the issue of precisely what the SIS’s objective is to be in future or how this ‘broadest sense’ referred to by the Presidency can be defined remains open. In my opinion, only when the question about the definition of the objectives of the SIS is answered in a clear and politically acceptable way can the debate on issues such as new functions or new users be properly answered. Consequently, discussions are ongoing on proposals for the introduction of new functions, new users, a new architecture, new synergies, in particular with the visa information system, and new management. Discussions are still taking place on the location, too. These amendments, which we hope will be accepted, obviously have repercussions for data protection and for the protection of citizens’ fundamental rights. We reiterate that any decision taken must always be accompanied by the highest data protection standards, specifically the requirements stipulated by Article 118 of the Schengen Convention, in a constant attempt to achieve the right balance between security and freedom. I hope that this report will help to make the debate on SIS II more transparent, to accentuate the need for Parliament to monitor the process, to emphasise the need for its management to be supervised by Community bodies and to ensure that greater effectiveness always goes hand in hand with the desirable and necessary reinforcement of the issues of data protection and of safeguarding citizens’ rights.

Political group: PPE-DE