Europe in 12 lessons (PDF)

Europe in 12 lessons
Freedom to move
Personal freedom to move around within the
EU raises security issues for the member
states, since checks have been abolished at
most of the Union’s internal borders. To
compensate for this, extra security measures
have to be put in place at the EU’s external
borders. And since freedom of movement in
the Union applies to criminals too, the EU’s
national police forces and judicial authorities
have to work together to combat international
crime.
The three concepts of freedom, security and
justice are, in fact, closely linked. Freedom
becomes largely meaningless if people cannot
live in safety, protected by a legal system
on which all can rely equally.
On 15 and 16 October 1999, the European
Council held a special meeting at Tampere
(Finland) to discuss the whole question of
justice and home affairs. The EU’s leaders
agreed on a very clear and ambitious programme
of action – some 60 steps to be
taken by 2004 to turn the Union into ‘an
area of freedom, security and justice’. The
European Commission was given the task of
monitoring the EU’s progress via a ‘scoreboard’.
The main issues tackled at Tampere were:
• a common EU policy on asylum and migration;
One of the most important moves to make
life easier for travellers in the European
Union took place in 1985, when the governments
of Belgium, France, Germany,
Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed an
agreement in a little Luxembourg border
town called Schengen. They agreed to abolish
all checks on persons – regardless of
nationality – at their common borders, to
harmonise controls at their borders with
non-EU countries and to introduce a common
policy on visas.
They thus formed an area without internal
frontiers known as the Schengen Area. At its
external borders, EU citizens need show only
their identity card or passport.
The 1985 Schengen Agreement, the 1990
Convention implementing it and all laws
derived from those agreements have since
become an integral part of the EU Treaties,
and the Schengen Area has gradually
expanded. Since March 2001, Iceland and
Norway as well as 13 EU countries (Austria,
Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany,
Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
Portugal, Spain and Sweden) have been fully
implementing the Schengen rules.
The aim is not to create a ‘fortress Europe’
but to make it easier for people to enter the
European Union legally and to move around
in it freely. At the same time, the EU is determined
to combat the activities of criminal
gangs who exploit human beings.
• a genuine ‘European area of justice’;
• a Union-wide fight against crime;
• stronger external action.
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