On Tuesday, 12 June 2007, the home affairs ministers of the European Union met in Luxembourg for their last Council meeting under the German Presidency. Following the informal meeting of home affairs ministers in the German city of Dresden in mid-January and the first two formal Council meetings in Brussels on 15 February and in Luxembourg on 20 April, today’s meeting focused on implementing further measures contained in the Federal Interior Ministry’s work programme for the German EU Council Presidency.
The ministers also achieved agreement with regard to the Regulation governing the Visa Information System (VIS) and the decision granting the security authorities and Europol access to the VIS, thus concluding the VIS negotiations, which have already taken several years.
Interior Minister Schäuble said in Luxembourg: “The Visa Information System is a particularly important tool for strengthening the area of security, freedom and justice. The EC Regulation governing the Visa Information System allows the competent authorities (in particular visa, border and immigration agencies) to store in a central European database alphanumeric and biometric data on visa applicants and visas which have been issued, denied or revoked, and retrieve the data concerned. This enables them to prevent what is referred to as visa shopping, and to identify applications by the same person under different names,” Federal Minister Schäuble explained. The Council Decision on access to the Visa Information System (VIS) allows security authorities to query the VIS for the purpose of preventing, detecting and investigating terrorist offences and other serious criminal offences. Giving the security authorities this new possibility to search the VIS will allow a major advance in protecting against international terrorism and organized crime in particular,” he added.
Furthermore, the ministers discussed the implementation status of the Schengen Information System (SIS). The SIS is the most important common search system used by the European police and border guard authorities. It allows them to obtain information related to alerts on persons and objects and to alerts issued for the purpose of refusing entry. Therefore it is necessary to connect the new EU Member States which have acceded to the EU since 1 May 2004 to the system to be able to abolish controls at the internal borders of these countries. To this end, Member States’ home affairs ministers decided already last December to introduce “SISone4all”. Federal Minister Schäuble: “Obviously we are on schedule. Portugal is in charge of project management for ‘SISone4all’. At the Council I therefore reiterated my thanks to Portugal, but also to France, for supporting the central system in Strasbourg.”
The home affairs ministers also talked about the new developments of the second-generation SIS. In the past, the introduction of SIS II, initially scheduled for 2007, had been delayed because of the system’s technical complexity. Therefore, the German Presidency has made every effort to avoid further delays in realizing SIS II in line with the revised schedule (start of the system in December 2008).
“The functional improvements related to the introduction of SIS II such as the possibility to store and transmit fingerprints and photos are important innovations”, emphasized Federal Minister Schäuble. “Since, as an interim solution, new Member States are connected on the basis of the current Schengen Information System, the delay in introducing SIS II has no impact on the removal of internal border controls. At the moment, technical documents are being revised to achieve a stable basis for developing the system. Therefore we could say today that we have made good progress”, said Schäuble.
Federal Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble also reported on the establishment of an informal high-level advisory group on the future of European home affairs policy from 2010 (the goals of the common EU home affairs policy through the end of 2009 are defined in the Hague Programme). This will ensure that the Council and the Commission get a head start on thinking about how to improve security in Europe even further by 2015. The group is made up of the home affairs ministers of the current and upcoming trio presidencies (Germany, Portugal, Slovenia, France, the Czech Republic and Sweden), one representative of the following trio presidency (Spain), Vice-President Frattini, and – where appropriate – experts from individual Member States. The first meeting of the group was held in the German town of Eltville on 20/21 May, i.e. under the German Presidency. Vice-President Frattini and the ministers discussed in particular options for the future of the European border management agency Frontex, of joint Schengen border and visa management and of border police cooperation with third countries. The next meeting of the group will be held in Brussels on 25 June. It will primarily deal with the growing overlap between internal and external security issues. The group will present a comprehensive report in autumn 2008, in time for the start of formal negotiations on the post-Hague Programme on the future of home affairs policy in the EU.
