Brussels, 22/04/2004 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday, the European Union and the United States signed an agreement to improve the security of maritime container transport, as part of anti-terrorism measures. This agreement creates a framework for co-operation between customs authorities for checks on containers imported into, transhipped through or transiting between the EU and the US, no matter where they originated from. The practical details of co-operation are still to be decided by a working group, whose mandate is to define standards for checks, identification of "high risk" loads, electronic screening and information exchanges.
This agreement will replace the bilateral agreements between the US and seven Member States (France, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands), said a Commission source on Wednesday. The Commission will thus be able to abandon the infringement proceedings it began mid-2003 against these States. It believed at the time that the bilateral agreements would create competition distortion, as they ensure that goods shipped from the signatory States would enter American ports more easily.
The US concluded similar agreements with 18 countries, as part of the "Container Security Initiative", which was adopted by Washington after the attacks of 11 September 2001. This initiative, which was recently bolstered by an international port security programme, provides, amongst other things, for American coast-guards into third-country ports to check that security measures are being implemented. Jonathan Todd, the spokesperson to the Commissioner in charge of customs, Fritz Bolkestein, played down the scope of these extra-territorial controls on Thursday, indicating that in Rotterdam, for example, there are only around a dozen American customs officials, compared to thousands of Dutch ones. "They will no doubt stay where they are, but the main thing will be the information exchange", he added. However, there are no plans to send European customs officers to American ports, as "we will have the same checking methods".
These measures come under the framework of an agreement on port security, which was signed at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), and which will enter into force in July 2004. According to the OECD, the cost of security measures created by the IMO code will be somewhere around the billion EUR mark.