Community Customs Code: external transit procedure

The common position very largely adhered to the amendments adopted by Parliament at first reading, and corresponded to the amended proposal subsequently presented by the Commission. The main amendments accepted concerned: a) the insertion, in a recital, of a reference to provisions adopted under the committee procedure, thus applying to them the principles of simplification and clarification of the rules for the benefit of both operators and managers of the transit procedure; b) the scope of external transit (Art. 91(1)(b) of the code); c) amendments concerning guarantees (Art. 94 of the code), mainly concerning the following points: - the conditions for acceptance of a smaller guarantee or exemption from the guarantee requirement; - exclusion of sensitive goods from exemption from the guarantee requirement; - introduction of the possibility of temporarily prohibiting reduction of or exemption from the comprehensive guarantee in exceptional circumstances, while exempting from this ban operators who guarantee a very high standard of security for their operations; d) exemption from the guarantee requirement for certain modes of transport (Art. 95 of the code); e) carrier and consignee jointly responsible with the holder (Art. 96 of the code). The text associated with the amendment of Article 91(1)(b) is supplemented by a clause pointing out to the committee responsible for defining the situations where external transit applies to Community goods that it should take account of the risks involved and should consider not applying the transit procedure only where an equivalent standard of security is guaranteed in another way to ensure that exports are controlled and monitored.�