Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-01-Speech-3-228"
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"en.20090401.18.3-228"2
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"Mr President, the Community Code on Visas seeks to harmonise and clarify the visa procedure throughout the Schengen area. Everyone applying for a visa should be treated equally, irrespective of the Schengen consulate he or she turns to. Good administrative practice and a dignified reception should be guaranteed and the entry of genuine travellers should be facilitated.
Rules concerning the introduction of the requirement for holders of visas to give their fingerprints and the option of relocating the reception and processing of visa applicants were already approved on a previous occasion in a separate report tabled by Baroness Ludford. These rules have been included in the Community Code as an integral part of this Code.
Thank you, Sarah, for your close cooperation.
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) This proposed regulation should be established by means of the codecision procedure between Parliament and the Council. After work that has taken nearly three years and that has required intensive negotiations with the Council, I am pleased, as rapporteur, to now be able to table a compromise proposal, which the Council has approved and which I hope will win the approval of Parliament.
I would like to say a special thank you to the shadow rapporteurs Mrs Klamt, Mr Cashman, Mrs Ždanoka and Mrs Kaufmann for their very constructive cooperation and strong support in the negotiations. Without the support of a unanimous committee, Parliament would not have achieved such a good result in the negotiations. I would also like to extend my thanks to the Commission, which tabled a sound initial proposal that was gratifying to develop further. My thanks also go to the French and Czech Presidencies, both of which demonstrated the will to recognise the problems that Parliament wished to address and the ability to meet Parliament half way.
With the Commission’s proposal as a starting point, all of the compromises represented improvements on the current situation and it proved possible to resolve the most difficult issues with the French Presidency even before Christmas. Of course, the whole preparation and negotiation process would never have succeeded without the splendid work carried out by my own able staff and that of my colleagues, the committee secretariat and the officials from the political groups. I would like to extend a particularly warm thank you to them.
The three most important results that we have achieved are: firstly, that a multiple-entry visa not only can, but must, be issued when certain agreed criteria are met; secondly, that the Member States have undertaken to enter into an agreement to represent each other, so that no one applying for a visa need make disproportionately difficult journeys in order to reach a competent Schengen consulate; and, thirdly, that a common website is to be set up to provide a unified picture of the Schengen area and to provide information regarding the rules applying to the granting of visas.
The fact that the visa fee could not be reduced from EUR 60 to EUR 35 is disappointing. However, this disappointment is assuaged by the fact, for example, that children under the age of six and persons under the age of 25 representing organisations in seminars, sports activities or cultural events will receive their visa free of charge.
I would like to finish by saying that this reform introduces two instruments that will be very important factors in the uniform application of the Schengen rules actually becoming a reality, namely the visa information system, which is a database covering all of the Schengen countries and which will provide the consulates with information in real time on who has applied for a visa, who has been granted a visa, who has had his or her application for a visa rejected and which visas have been withdrawn, and renewed local institutional cooperation between the Schengen consulates in different countries."@en1
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