WRITTEN QUESTION E-0422/02

by Jonas Sjöstedt (GUE/NGL) to the Commission

(21 February 2002)

Subject: Customs searches and coordination between customs authorities in the Union

This question arises from an actual case which occurred on the weekend following the New Year 2002. A number of Swedish families were travelling by coach from Yugoslavia to Sweden with a Danish company, Espergerde Bussfart AS. The coach started about 8 a.m. on the Friday in southern Serbia, picked up passengers in Belgrade and other places, and then travelled from Yugoslavia through Hungary, Austria, Germany and Denmark to Sweden. There were no major customs checks throughout the trip until the coach was leaving Germany at Rostock. It arrived about 11 on the Sunday morning and was one of four coaches pulled in for a search. The search lasted six hours and all the passengers, most of them families, some with small children, were ordered out into the cold to stand with their luggage in a long queue in front of the customs officials (dressed up in combat gear). All the baggage and the coach were subjected to a rigorous search. After six hours the coach was released after six or seven excess bottles of alcohol and about the same number of cartons of cigarettes had been found among these not very wealthy travellers (long distance coach travel being a low budget option) for which fines of 44 euros per item were charged. The coach arrived at 6 p.m. at Gedser only to find the Danish customs waiting. They began an equally exhaustive search with a new enforced wait and an extended check involving body searches and the use of dogs. The passengers were thus detained for 12 hours in EU countries.

How long may people be detained by the customs authorities? By comparison, during police custody a person is entitled to call in legal assistance and may not be detained for long periods without good reason. Would not one exhaustive search in one country be enough, or should the customs be able to conduct search after search in one country after the other on the same coach and the same passengers for hours and hours and days and days without sustenance or rest?

Reply given by Mr Bolkestein on behalf of the Commission

(16 April 2002)

The Commission shares the feelings expressed by the Honourable Member. Nevertheless, we wish to direct his attention to two points.

Firstly, the circumstances of the case, insofar as they are described in the question, make it difficult to establish the precise aim of the checks conducted by the customs authorities.

They may have been looking for fraud relating to customs duties. In such cases, customs officers are empowered to conduct checks as laid down in Articles 4(14), 13 and 78 of the Community Customs Code. Insofar as there are no provisions for exchange of information between Member States for checks of this type carried out onboard a vehicle, it is neither implausible nor illegal that such a vehicle, its passengers and their baggage, who have already been checked in one Member State, should be required to undergo another inspection by the authorities of a second Member State.

The customs authorities may also have been in search of prohibited goods (drugs, weapons, etc). The regulations governing the control of such goods (such as those covered by Articles 28 and 30 of the EC Treaty, for example), have still not been harmonised at Community level.

Finally, the customs authorities may have wished to check the persons themselves (their identity papers, residence papers, etc.).

As a result, the fact that two separate checks were carried out within the Community, one after the other, on a single vehicle, does not per se contravene Community regulations. Moreover, it is quite possible that the first check may have concerned import duty offences, while the second was looking for goods which are prohibited in the Member State in question.

Secondly, the Commission also wishes to draw the Honourable Member's attention to the division of responsibilities determined by Title VI of the Treaty on European Union on police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters, on the one hand, and by the EC Treaty, on the other.

The EC Treaty created a customs union between the Member States, but did not specify in every case the judicial instruments which national customs authorities could use to apply Community regulations. As a result, the rules on criminal procedure for checks on goods and persons fall under the Treaty on European Union. This means that common rules governing national criminal procedures can only be drawn up through the intergovernmental procedures laid down in that Treaty. It is possible that a European framework could be defined for certain administrative prerogatives mentioned by the Honourable Member.

Finally, the Commission is working to help prevent the recurrence of events such as those described by the Honourable Member through the transnational risk analysis programmes we have launched. Active cooperation between national administrations should thus ensure that customs checks are focused on those transport operations which constitute a real risk.