Janelly Fourtou, rapporteur. – (FR) Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, now that we have come to the end of three years of hard work I am delighted at what has been achieved in respect of the key points in this document.

The customs union is one of the pillars of the European Union and an essential element in the functioning of the internal market. The present Community Customs Code, which was drawn up in the 1980s and adopted in the 1990s, is now outdated. Our customs services are faced with new challenges. In 2007 world trade totalled nearly 16 billion dollars, or 31% of global GDP, and the European Union alone accounted for 20% of the total volume of global imports and exports.

The customs services are therefore responsible for maintaining the smooth flow of trade and the controls that are needed to provide for this, while at the same time ensuring that the safety and security of EU citizens is protected. If a satisfactory balance is to be reached the control methods used have to be modernised and the level of cooperation strengthened between the different services and economic operators.

The Code also has to be adapted to other radical changes that have occurred in the international commercial environment, mainly resulting from the growing and irreversible recourse to IT and electronic data exchange technologies. This particular subject was also the focus of a report that was drawn up by my colleague Mr Heaton-Harris and adopted by Parliament last December.

The first reading of the modernised customs code was adopted on 12 December 2006 and the German Presidency managed to secure a political agreement on 25 June 2007. Parliament adopted 51 amendments to the proposal at first reading, 34 of which, mostly of a substantive nature, were taken over fully or in part in the Council common position.

The main subjects of disagreement were the status of authorised economic operator, the right to act as a customs representative, centralised customs clearance and comitology. The status of authorised economic operator, which is directly related to the events of 11 September, was introduced by the so-called ‘security amendment’ Regulation, whose aim was to offer greater facilities to operators and hence offset the new burdens they had to shoulder in order to cope with security-related aspects.

Your rapporteur is satisfied that the concept developed by Parliament at first reading has been taken over; this involves drawing a distinction between two types of authorisation, namely ‘customs simplification’, on one hand, and ‘safety and security’, on the other. This pragmatic solution allows for the different needs of the economic operators.

Turning to the subject of customs representatives, emotions have been running fairly high in those countries which have had a long history of this profession. While the Council has not adopted Parliament’s proposals to the letter, it has nevertheless proceeded from the premise that customs representatives and authorised economic operators should interact along the lines we desired.

Your rapporteur believes that the Council has arrived at a good compromise. Moreover, this solution has been accepted by customs representatives associations, even though they have lost their monopoly in certain Member States.

As far as centralised customs clearance is concerned, we have another novelty in that the Council has introduced a new Article 106, taking the view that it is more logical and transparent for all of the provisions of the Code related to this concept to be encompassed within a single article.

Henceforth all economic operators may benefit from centralised clearance on the territory of any one Member State. In cases involving several Member States they have to satisfy the eligibility criteria for authorised economic operator status.

Finally, of all the areas in which this document has made significant progress we can also be very pleased that we have broadened out the comitology process to cover 44 provisions of the modernised customs code.

For this reason I am calling on Parliament to support the Council common position without amendment.