Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, there is a story behind this regulation too; its history extends over the whole of the last parliamentary term. You will remember that at that time, after the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty, uniform rules on visas were to be introduced within the European Union for the first time. This meant that people from third countries entering the European Union were in principle to be subject to the same visa requirements in all countries in the European Union. At the time the Commission had already made a proposal which on the whole was very good and which also received support in Parliament. Unfortunately the Council then made fundamental changes to this proposal and more or less declared the entire visa list to be as good as non-binding when it said that anyone could go beyond it and either impose visa requirements on additional states or leave it at that; they simply had to notify this. At the time the European Parliament considered that its views had not been properly taken into account and, moreover, that this result was also contrary to what the Maastricht Treaty actually intended. We then instituted legal action. We won the case before the European Court of Justice. The Council regulation concerned was declared null and void. The result was that the Commission made a new proposal to us which was very similar to its first proposal, to which we again gave an essentially positive assessment in Parliament, and which then, because of the change of legal base – Maastricht gave way to Amsterdam – had to be recast in a new proposal, which is now on the table here and which we must once again debate. Parliament continues to believe that the visa list in this visa regulation must be definitive, which means that there must be no more exceptions to it, so no black, green, blue, yellow or grey lists, but please just one list, one list which is binding and no other. This is a crucial point if we are finally to have uniform rules on visas in the European Union. In addition, the Commission has given ground on one important point, which Parliament regarded as essential even last time round. It concerns the visa requirements for two associated countries, which are now of course already a long way into the accession process, namely Bulgaria and Romania. Parliament has always been of the opinion that these states should be exempt from visa requirements. We came to this conclusion on the basis that much progress has been made in these countries on internal security and many other issues. The Commission has now also accepted this and is proposing to include Bulgaria and Romania in the list of states which are exempt from visa requirements. We see this as a step forward. Obviously these countries have in the meantime also managed to convince the Commission. Now we can only hope that, if possible, after listening to the European Parliament, the Council makes the same decision and also recognises that important progress has been made here. My plea to the Council would be that it should debate this regulation as soon as possible. I should like once again to extend my warmest thanks to the plenary, but also this time to the Conference of Presidents, which put this report on today's agenda even though it had not originally planned to do so, precisely because this makes it possible to complete our business quickly and send out an appropriate signal. In the run-up to this debate a whole series of requests for amendments, which it was hoped we would adopt here, were sent to me from the Council. For example, there was a proposal to introduce so-called reciprocity. What is this? Quite simply, citizens from individual Member States are subject to visa requirements in some third countries. These Member States should, it is argued, have the possibility of demanding visas from citizens from these same third countries. I rejected this. Not because I do not have sympathy for these Member States' demands, but because I believe that in introducing this we would again be contravening the overall principle and we would again be in breach of the provisions of the Treaty, which provides precisely for a standard visa list comprising a list of countries which are subject to visa requirements and a list of those which are not. For this reason I do not believe that we can introduce a provision of this kind. In Europe we have come so far – I only need to mention the implementation of Schengen, meaning that there are no longer any controls at the vast majority of borders – that nothing else is simply good enough anymore. We need standard rules on visas, and I think that the Commission has tabled a good proposal. We have also debated it in Parliament accordingly, I hope, as the Commission had in mind. Now it is the Council's turn. As soon as possible it ought to produce a result which is as constructive as possible.

Political group: PPE-DE