WRITTEN QUESTION E-2674/98

by Gerhard Hager (NI) to the Commission

(1 September 1998)

Subject: Assistance to enable applicant countries to meet the Schengen criteria

It has been repeatedly stressed that, if they are to qualify for membership, applicant countries must take over the acquis communautaire and hence the EU standards governing external border checks. The effectiveness of the applicant countries' border policing is currently attracting increasingly voluble criticism, and the doubts whether the above-mentioned criterion is being fulfilled are mounting. That was why, when it addressed Parliament in Strasbourg on 15 July 1998, the Presidency-in-Office of the Council expressly called on the Commission to seek ways of helping the applicant countries to secure their borders, pointing out that the external borders of the 11 countries in question, placed end to end, were 6 600 km long and it was necessary to comprehend that order of magnitude.

1. How will the Commission comply with the above request?

2. Is it already making practical preparations? How much funding is it envisaging?

3. Which budget headings should be used to provide the appropriations, and what legal bases will be invoked to implement the corresponding expenditure?

4. How can such aid be justified, given that other Member States have recently had to rely solely on their own resources in order to meet the Schengen criteria, even though, as far as Austria on its own is concerned - to name but one example - the external border as defined for Schengen purposes is 2 400 km long?

Joint answer

to Written Questions E-2126/98 and E-2674/98 given by Mr Monti on behalf of the Commission

(11 November 1998)

Declaration No 44 annexed to the Treaty of Amsterdam states that, upon the date of entry into force of that Treaty, the Council shall adopt all the necessary measures referred to in Article 2 of the Protocol integrating the Schengen acquis into the framework of the European Union, and in particular the Decisions defining the Schengen acquis and breaking down its components between the first and third pillars. Preparatory work is under way on these measures. The Council Decisions mentioned above will be published in the Official Journal.

Pursuant to the Schengen acquis on the implementation of the Schengen provisions and to Article 2(2) of the Schengen Protocol, the Council, acting with the unanimity of the Schengen members, will decide whether applicant countries have implemented the Schengen acquis and can take part in the area without internal frontiers. This decision will be taken after ensuring that all the preconditions are met, including controls and surveillance of external borders in accordance with Schengen standards.

In December 1994 the European Council meeting at Essen decided, as part of the preparation of the associated countries for accession to the Union, to extend cooperation with these countries to third-pillar matters (including border controls, asylum, immigration, police and customs cooperation, and judicial cooperation). To implement this decision, the Commission requested a report on the needs of the countries concerned in the areas of justice and home affairs. The task was allocated to a high-level expert who was a former member of the K4 Committee. In October 1995, the Commission received a report on his visits to the associated countries, and has since implemented a number of measures to meet the needs identified in the report.

1. The Phare Horizontal Programme for Justice and Home Affairs (also called the Horizontal Phare JHA Programme). This programme is termed "horizontal" because it covers all the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) which have applied for membership and emphasises interregional cooperation and multi-country activities, particularly in the areas of training and exchanges. With a budget of ECU 11 million for the period 1996-1998, the programme enabled a needs identification mission to travel to each of the ten CEECs between June 1997 and June 1998, with the intention of going into the report's conclusions in greater detail and proposing projects to bring the CEECs up to standard in the JHA area. These missions were carried out by police officers, judges and other officials appointed by the Member States through their national justice and home affairs contact points, and covered four areas, three of which are directly or indirectly linked to border controls (border management, asylum and immigration, police cooperation), with the fourth area covering justice. Provision has also been made under the Horizontal Phare JHA Programme to set up an across-the-board training measure for police forces in the applicant countries, run by the European Association of Police Colleges. This training measure will be used to harmonise the police training curricula in the CEECs on the basis of the methods used in the Union, and will include a major section on border controls and, in particular, the fight against trafficking.

2. A Phare multi-country management programme for the eastern frontier of the Baltic States was set up with an ECU 6 million budget from the 1997 Phare allocation to strengthen the capacity of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to manage their newly-created eastern frontier and combat cross-border trafficking. The aim of the programme is to make sure that both the "green frontier" and official border posts are controlled, and provides support for border guards in the areas of communications, information technology, surveillance, mobility, tactical back-up and training. In addition to these two programmes, mention should also be made of the Phare multi-country customs modernisation programme and, in particular, the national Phare allocations.

3. The Phare multi-country customs modernisation programme began in 1995. It involves helping the applicant countries to take more effective action to fight trafficking in drugs, stolen cars and nuclear materials. More specifically, an ECU 0,5 million project was launched in October 1997 to make checks at border posts more efficient by introducing risk-analysis techniques into customs officers' working methods.

4. The national Phare allocations. It is these national allocations that fund most of the work to bring the CEECs up to standard in the JHA area in general, and in the area of border controls in particular, by equipping and training border guards and other forces involved in border surveillance.

A distinction needs to be made here between the situation that existed prior to the adoption of the enhanced pre-accession strategy in December 1997 and the situation since the beginning of 1998.

- the situation up to December 1997. Following the country reports drawn up under the Horizontal Phare JHA Programme, a number of border projects were launched. A project to computerise border posts was written into the 1997 operational programme for Hungary (ECU 4 million) following a mission to that country in June of the same year. The programme for the eastern frontier of the Baltic States (see above) was extended to Poland in 1997 (ECU 12 million). Other border-related projects such as the provision of fingerprinting equipment to the Polish police (ECU 5 million) and the development of machine-readable identity papers in the Czech Republic were funded under previous national programmes;

- the situation since the beginning of 1998. Under the enhanced pre-accession strategy put forward by the Commission in its Agenda 2000 document and formally adopted by the European Council meeting in Luxembourg in December 1997, the Phare programme has been reshaped to ensure greater focus on the goal of accession. The future priorities for the programme include, in particular, assistance for the applicant countries to upgrade their administrative and legal capacity. Approximately 30 % of Phare resources will be allocated to this objective, amounting to nearly ECU 500 million in subsidies each year. JHA is one of the four priority areas identified in the context of upgrading administrative and legal capacity, and this upgrading is one of the main challenges the applicant countries will have to meet if they are to implement the acquis effectively. Twinning schemes between government departments in the Member States and the applicant countries, including long-term secondments of experts from the Member States to the applicant countries, will thus be set up in the JHA area from the end of 1998, particularly in the area of border controls. These twinning projects will be funded from the national allocations of the Phare programme.

It should be noted that all Phare measures are funded under budget heading B7-500. There is no co-financing by beneficiaries under the Phare programme, unlike programmes under Title VI of the TEU (Grotius, Oisin, Odysseus, Falcone, Stop), which provide for co-financing between the Commission and the project promoter (the applicant countries can take part in these programmes if invited to do so by the project initiator, but they cannot submit project applications). Phare nevertheless comes under the general heading of "accession partnerships" through which the applicant countries undertake to adopt the acquis of the Union and its Member States (which requires heavy investment on their part in terms of legislation, reorganisation and training) and obtain financial support from the Union to achieve this goal.

The level of economic development and financial capacity of the CEEC applicants for membership cannot be compared with that of the three countries which joined the Union in January 1995. Furthermore, the problems they have to solve in all areas to meet the Copenhagen criteria are infinitely more complex given that, with the fall of communism, they have their entire political/administrative, economic and social system to rebuild. Their exceptional circumstances justify the implementation of the enhanced pre-accession strategy put forward by the Commission in its July 1997 Agenda 2000 document and formally adopted by the Luxembourg European Council in December 1997.