Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-11-Speech-3-322"
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"en.20090311.35.3-322"2
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Mr President, Mr Vondra, thank you for the Czech Presidency’s commitment to this issue. Your support has been much appreciated.
Anyway, what I should like to say to you, after the Czech Presidency – and once again I am grateful to Mr Vondra for the Czech Presidency’s commitment to this difficult issue – is that I truly believe that, together with the current Presidency, we have made every effort to avoid any further delay and to genuinely enable our co-contractor to meet our expectations. In any case, we shall have a definite date fixed to enable the Council to take the necessary decisions. Once again, I do, of course, undertake to keep Parliament informed.
I should first of all like to reply to Mr Marinescu by saying that there is no particular problem, given that the Member States that are not yet members of Schengen will be able to join in the SIS II system too. We shall have several ‘slots’, or times, when new Member States that are not Schengen members will be able to join in SIS II, and so, all being well, there should not be any particular problems.
Mrs Grabowska, I must thank you also for all that the Republic of Poland is doing to guard the external borders. I have had the opportunity to observe, in fact, the quality of the work carried out by Frontex with the Polish teams on the Ukrainian border.
I should simply like to say, in response to Mrs Roure and Mrs Grabowska, that the problem is basically a technical one. It is not, as Mr Vondra said, a political problem. The truth is, quite simply, that the Member States, or some Member States, have made greater and greater demands. Therefore, it has to be said, SIS II has had to meet increasingly sophisticated objectives. Consequently, the system has become more complex and, despite all the tributes you have paid to information technology, the implementation has turned out to be more difficult than expected. Nonetheless, it is true that the problem remains essentially a technical one and that it should therefore be able to be resolved.
I should like to say to Mr Pirker that Parliament will be kept well informed, and I hereby undertake to do this. I have personally taken this on during the course of this project, and I think I can say that I truly consider it to be an absolute priority. I wish also to reassure Mr Brejc that we have clearly identified those in charge. Working with the Commission, we have set up this Task Force, in which the Member States are closely involved. I think that we now have a definite steering group, but our co-contractor also has to be able to meet the requirements we have set.
I should also like to reply to the financial question posed by Mr Pirker and Mr Posselt just now. The Commission’s total budget commitment for the SIS II project amounts to about EUR 68 million. The corresponding contracts include feasibility studies, development of the actual central system, support and quality control, the s-Testa network, preparation for operational management in Strasbourg, security, preparations in relation to biometric matters, and communication. That, then, is the commitment: EUR 68 million.
As far as payments are concerned, EUR 27 million have actually been spent to date on technical development: EUR 20 million on developing the system; EUR 7 million on providing a network that is at the forefront of technical progress; and EUR 4 500 000 on quality assurance.
It has to be said that if, after gaining a clear idea of the reliability or lack of reliability of SIS II, the Council decided to move over to the SIS I+R formula, we could at that point consider reusing the communication network put in place for SIS II, meaning that the corresponding investments could, for the most part, be preserved.
Our real problem, ladies and gentlemen, is equipping Schengen, the Schengen area of free movement, with a genuinely effective tool. It is true that, if we succeed with Schengen II, it will be the most effective system in the world, given the results it will enable us to achieve. The information technology, however, has to be in place."@en1
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