15-16 October: Tampere summit

Date: 21/10/1999

EU LEADERS made major progress towards harmonising their policies in the justice and home affairs field at a special two-day summit in the Finnish industrial city of Tampere last weekend. Prior to the meeting, many governments had feared that the first get-together of heads of state and government to discuss internal affairs would be a flop, but most leaders left Tampere claiming the Union had made a significant step forward in responding to citizens' security concerns. “We fired a starting gun on developing a common area of justice,” said German Chancellor Gerhard Schräder.

THE most sensitive issue dealt with by EU leaders and their foreign ministers was asylum and immigration policy. After a heated debate, they agreed to work towards establishing a common European asylum system, based firmly on the “absolute respect of the right to seek asylum”. Heads of state and government urged the adoption of a harmonised set of asylum and immigration policies by 2004, and said that this should be based on common minimum conditions for the reception of asylum-seekers and a clear definition of what constitutes refugee status.

However, there was no agreement on the vexed question of how to share the burden of mass influxes of refugees. Some countries pushed for the EU to set quotas for the reception of displaced persons, but Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen insisted that such a strict mathematical equation was “out of the question”. Neither was there support for a new European fund to help countries cover the costs of mass arrivals of refugees. Instead, EU leaders asked the European Commission to propose legislation on temporary protection for such people before June 2000.

Heads of state made concrete progress on tackling cross-border crime, adopting a package of measures which will sig-nificantly boost the powers of the Union's crime-busting body Europol. The proposals approved by EU leaders include the setting up of joint investigative teams to combat terrorism and drugs trafficking; the establishment of a crime-busting task force of senior police officers; and the founding of a European police college to train law enforcement officials.

EU leaders stopped short of endorsing proposals to set up a European public prosecutor's office. But they did call for the creation of a new body of national prosecutors, magistrates and senior police officers to coordinate work on cross-border criminal investigations. They also declared war on money laundering, which heads of state and government described as “at the very heart of organised crime”. Lipponen said that “when money laundering is suspected, banking secrecy will be lifted” and called for investigators to have better access to cross-border financial transactions.