The Danish minister for Justice Lene Espersen and the minister for Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs, as well as European Affairs, Bertel Haarder, presented the European Parliament with the Danish Presidency’s plans on Justice and Home Affairs.

Apart from continuing the on-going work, the Danish Presidency presented a number of new initiatives in order to strengthen police co-operation and judicial co-operation in criminal matters as well as in civil matters.

Ms Espersen introduced 12 new initiatives by the Presidency on co-operation with the United States on terrorism, increasing exchange of information on the basis of national databases and developing Europol’s operative support capacity.

Ensuring efficient means of investigation in relation to the abuse of modern information technology by criminals and ensuring efficient rules on confiscation of the proceeds of crime in all Member States, is also a goal. The minister emphasised that the most important task was to complete enlargement and get the candidate countries ready to join the EU – also in the justice and home affairs area.

Minister Bertel Haarder said that the Danish presidency would work on getting common asylum policies in place and follow up on the decisions taken at the Seville Summit, in June. This would mean implementation of the Dublin II Convention (deciding which country should be responsible for asylum claims), setting up Eurodac – a computer system that among others things includes the fingerprints of asylum seekers, establishing a visa database and setting up a European external border police.

The Minister emphasised that “there is a limit to common rules one can introduce in this area. The integration problems are very different from Copenhagen to Marseilles and a line has to be drawn between EU legislation and national legislation.”