News Releases

No. 21/07
March 5, 2007

EU COMMISSIONER LÁSZLÓ KOVÁCS AND US SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY MICHAEL CHERTOFF AGREE TO STRENGTHEN COOPERATION TO IMPROVE SECURITY AND COMBAT COUNTERFEIT TRADE

EU Commissioner László Kovács (shown on right above), responsible for Taxation and Customs, today met his US counterpart, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and agreed to continue to strengthen co-operation to tackle growing security concerns and to explore ways to facilitate trade between the EU and the US, which represents over 40% of world trade.

Mutual recognition of trade partnership programs, and in particular the EU's Authorized Economic Operator program and the US Customs Trade Partnership program, is vital to achieve this. Early actions to compare and evaluate the programs are underway and pilot actions to test the systems in practice will follow in the coming weeks.

"Mutual recognition of these programs would reduce the burden on legitimate business by enabling them to receive customized controls and allow the enforcement authorities to concentrate main controls on high risk trade," stressed Commissioner László Kovács. "Bilateral and multi-lateral actions are the way to tackle this problem. Unilateral actions, such as 100% scanning of containers, are not only likely to be much less effective, but may turn out to be counter-productive."

Discussions also covered counterfeiting and piracy, both sides recognized the increasing threat to the consumer from dangerous fakes and agreed on the need to strengthen further existing co-operation to provide better protection to the consumer and legitimate business.

Similar discussions will take place tomorrow in Commissioner Kovács's meetings with representatives of the US Congress. The trip will conclude with a fact finding visit to the NY-Newark port.

For further information please visit:

http://www.eurunion.org/newsweb/HotTopics/CounterfeitContr.htm and http://ec.europa.eu/commission_barroso/kovacs/index_en.htm .

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