Customs: action programme Customs 2007, 2003-2007

The Commission stated that the amendments adopted by the European Parliament are in line with the Commission's proposal. The amendments to the objectives, the setting of priorities, the deletion of the repeal of Customs 2002 and the addition of the clause on existing applications are all considered valuable additions. The evaluation provisions have been improved. The Commission accepts all the amendments. More specifically, with regard to the amendments adopted by the Parliament and also accepted by the Commission, these: - strengthen Article 1 so that it explicitly refers to the need to guarantee the effective functioning of the internal market; - simplify Article 2 and adopt the term "participating countries"; - put together two types of objectives "overall" and "specific" under a specific Article (Article 3); - propose some changes concerning the co-operation and co-ordination between laboratories; - remove reference to the Customs 2007 Committee, whilst retaining flexibility for development in accordance with the objectives of the programmes; - add a clause to Article 6 which allows the continuation of existing Community IT systems. This ensures the funding of the AFIS system until 31 December 2003; - establish indicators in the first year of the programme, thereby giving a more representative evaluation and requires the report to be made to the European Parliament and the Council, rather than simply reporting to the Customs 2007 Committee.�