Schengen:Teething problems & first report (feature)
01 May 1996
The Schengen Agreement was supposed to come into operation on 26 March 1995 when the Schengen Information System (SIS) in Strasbourg finally went online. Passports controls were dropped but on 1 July 1995 when it was intended to drop checks at land border controls but France insisted on maintaining them after a series of bombs went off - invoking the "safeguard clause" (Article 2.2). At the Schengen Executive Committee meeting on 18 April 1996 France announced that it was prepared to drop border controls with Germany and France as they had now reached agreements to introduce "mobile border controls" (the Schengen Agreement calls for the removal of permanent border controls). But it would maintain controls on the borders with Belgium and Luxembourg as they acted, said the French government, as transit countries for drugs leaving the Netherlands. In a clear sign of hostility towards the Netherlands, France is promoting a Council of Europe resolution which would prohibit the production and trading of all drugs.
In response the Dutch government, which contests that it is "soft" on drugs, and at the meeting on 18 April made a Declaration saying the Schengen Agreement does not call for a harmonised drugs policy. Moreover, it implicitly rejected the systematic pursuit of individual drug users and said policy should be directed at "big organised international drug crime organisations."
Belgian Interior Minister, Johan Vande Lanotte, said the French checks were not even working on the common border and that "mobile" or "surprise" checks were much more efficient than predictable static control points.
There is annoyance at the French position over refusing to remove land border controls, first France pleaded that they were needed to combat terrorist attacks and then when these stopped said they were needed because of the Dutch drugs policy.
Expanding
At present the seven participating members of the Schengen Agreement are: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal and Germany.
Two of the signatories to the Agreement have still to get it ratified by their parliaments - Italy and Greece - because both have first to adopt data protection laws which are a prerequisite.
The Greek Justice Minister, Evangelos Venizelos, created quite a controversy in March when he told the parliament in Athens that the Socialist government would not ratify the Schengen Agreement as agreed by its predecessor because the SIS would violate peoples' privacy. But on 26 March after consternation by other Schengen countries the Greek government said it would be introducing a law on data protection and on 6 April the same Minister, Mr Venizelos, introduced a Bill to ratify the Agreement in the parliament.
Italy is also trying to get through a data protection law before seeking to ratify the Schengen Agreement. Mr Napolitano, the Interior Minister, said in Luxembourg on 4 June that the next likely "windows of opportunity" to join Schengen was March 1997. But he also referred to: "some dissatisfaction is being expressed by other countries that we were not being effective in removing those without residents permits." Italy it seems may be faced with similar treatment to that being faced by the Netherlands but this time on immigration policies from France and Germany.
Austria has already agreed to join once the Agreement is ratified by their parliament and computer links are set in place. Austria expects to be able to implement the Agreement for land borders towards the end of 1997 with an additional 3,000 border guards. However, "Flughagen Wien", the operating company for Vienna's Schwechat airport said they would not be in a position to implement separate exists for passport controls until 1998 at a cost of some Sch 400 million.
At the meeting on 18 April the Schengen countries agreed that the five countries in the Nordic Passport Union - Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland - could have ob