Brussels, 27/08/2003 (Agence Europe) - "Defending one's own borders amounts to defending Europe's borders", Italian Home Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said after a meeting last weekend with his German counterpart, Otto Schilly. The latter wished the Italian Presidency "total success". Both ministers give their support to the Neptune pilot project for maritime border surveillance. The project had been adopted at the end of July by the SCIFA + group on border control, the Italian Presidency recalls. It will cover control of the central and eastern Mediterranean with temporary control centres in Cyprus and Malta, the same source explains. The project comes on the list of pilot operations for border control conducted since the end of last year. Those taking part in the project will seek to carry it out more successfully than the Ulysses project, which, though also concerning the Mediterranean, had failed due to a lack of good communication between the vessels of the various Member States (EUROPE of 12 March, p.6).
The German and Italian ministers also welcomed the project of a surveillance centre for airport frontiers. The centre, whose creation has been contemplated over the past year (EUROPE of 30 May 2002), will be based in Italy for an initial experimental phase.
The idea of creating centres for the surveillance of maritime and airport borders had been submitted by the Greek Presidency to the European Council of Thessaloniki in June. The Presidency based its argument on the success by one of the border pilot projects, the centre for surveillance of land borders, based in Germany (EUROPE of 27 May, p.10). Greece, however, was disappointed by the result of most of the seventeen other projects, and criticised the lack of preparation and communication, especially for the Ulysses project.