Explanatory Memorandum to COM(2001)575 - Establishing common rules in the field of civil aviation security - Main contents
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This page contains a limited version of this dossier in the EU Monitor.
| dossier | COM(2001)575 - Establishing common rules in the field of civil aviation security. |
|---|---|
| source | COM(2001)575  |
| date | 10-10-2001 |
1. The criminal acts committed in New York and Washington on 11 September have severely shaken the international community and shown how sensitive societies based on freedom of movement and trade were to the acts of terrorists who use this freedom to try to destroy them. If there is any one human activity which is one of the symbols of these freedoms, it is air transport and so it is not surprising that it is one of the priority targets of these blind, inhuman acts. The media coverage of any accident involving this means of transport also helps to give terrorists the platform they seek to weaken our societies and to undermine the confidence on which these societies are founded. The aviation community must therefore respond in an exemplary manner to the threat which it is again facing it in order to restore public confidence and to help keep businesses operating.
2. This is the background to the decision, taken the day after the attacks by the Heads of State and Government, the President of the European Parliament, the President of the Commission and the High Representative responsible for the common foreign and security policy, that the European Union must take urgent decisions to respond to the new challenges facing it. For its part, the Council of the European Union, which met the same day, asked i the Ministers of Transport to evaluate the measures taken to ensure air transport security and any additional measures which should be taken.
3. On 14 September, the Council, at a special meeting of the Transport Ministers, adopted conclusions i in which it considers it is necessary, inter alia, to implement fully the essential measures to prevent unlawful acts against civil aviation contained in Document 30 of the European Civil Aviation Conference.
4. Lastly, the European Council, meeting in extraordinary session on 21 September, called upon "the Transport Council to take the necessary measures to strengthen air transport security at its next meeting on 15 October. These measures will cover in particular:
- classification of weapons;
- technical training for crews;
- checking and monitoring of hold luggage;
- protection of cockpit access;
- quality control of security measures applied by Member States.
Contents
Effective and uniform application of air security measures will be ensured in particular by a peer review to be introduced in the very near future."
An effective Community response
5. The Member States have been able to react in an appropriate manner to the waves of terrorism in the 70s and 80s up until the present time through cooperation within the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC). While passenger numbers increased four-fold and flight numbers doubled between 1970 and 1999, the number of acts affecting the security of air transport fell from 100 to 6 and the number of victims from 92 to 0.
6. The size of the threat was often also linked to the nationality of an airline and the place of departure or arrival of a flight, so it made more sense for preventive action to be taken on a case-by-case basis according to the threat and the situation lent itself less to common action.
7. The Community has therefore only been indirectly concerned with security through the Commission's legislative proposals on crew training (proposal for a Directive on safety requirements for cabin crews, i proposal for a Regulation amending Regulation 3922/91 to lay down common rules in the field of commercial operations by aircraft i) and the reporting of occurrences in civil aviation (proposal for a Directive on occurrence reporting in civil aviation i).
8. Recent events have shown that the situation has changed radically and that we are now all faced with the same threat in the Community since any aircraft can be hijacked on departure from an airport and used as a bomb against any city within its flying range. We are therefore all affected by the preventive measures taken in airports and these can no longer be left solely to the local authorities or even the national authorities responsible for an airport.
9. Awareness of this interdependence has come out clearly during discussions in the various bodies referred to above, leading to the realisation that everyone should now implement the same measures (those in Document 30), for both international and domestic flights, and that a collective mechanism should be devised to check that they are being applied (peer review).
10. Given this situation, the Commission believes the best way to achieve these objectives is to use the resources at the Community's disposal which have proven their value in a large number of other sectors.
11. The problem is the same as that of air safety and the same solutions could be adopted since the aim is to guarantee the highest possible uniform level of protection to all our citizens.
12. To achieve this, it will be sufficient to adopt common standards and to put means of control in place. Community discipline and the Treaty mechanisms will do the rest.
13. This approach also has several advantages. Thanks to the association agreements between the Community and various European States (European Economic Area, Community/Switzerland Agreement, Agreement on the European Civil Aviation Area), the incorporation of these standards into the Community acquis will extend the same level of protection to most of the European continent.
14. Furthermore, the mutual trust created by a collective auditing system in Community legislation will make it possible to avoid repeating the checks made on passengers, luggage and cargo in one Community airport when they are in transit through another Community airport, but without affecting security.
15. Lastly, this will help to reduce the administrative burden on air carriers who will only have to show to one single Member State that they are applying the measures incumbent upon them.
16. In view of the urgency of the situation and the need to restore public confidence in air transport speedily, the Commission has also concluded that, despite the different responsibilities which Member States have as regards the implementation of security measures, a Regulation is the best way to adopt common rules and put in place the mechanisms to monitor their effective, uniform application, not a Directive, which would take too long to implement. Since this essentially involves adopting and implementing common standards for aviation security, the legal basis for the adoption of this Regulation is obviously transport policy and Article 80 i of the Treaty.
17. As stated above, there is agreement that the essential measures contained in ECAC Document 30 should be the basis for Community action: it is therefore proposed incorporating its provisions into the Community legal order.
18. However, it is accepted that these measures are not detailed enough to enable their application to be monitored and that, for this purpose, detailed technical implementation standards need to be adopted, the technical nature of which is not very well suited to a conventional legal process. The Commission, assisted by a Committee of Representatives of the Member States, therefore needs to be given the power to adopt the implementing measures required. For this purpose, it will use the detailed technical specifications which the ECAC has developed for applying the memorandum of understanding on which it is currently working.
19. It is also a known fact that, while some of these measures are already applied in the Member States, such as the surveillance of sensitive areas and the checking of passengers and luggage, others are applied only very partially, such as the checking of hold luggage and cargo. It will therefore not be possible to implement all these measures effectively and uniformly immediately and this will require a realistic, gradual process to take account of the time which will be needed to recruit and train personnel or alter infrastructure. The Commission will take this into account when drafting the implementing measures.
20. Lastly, as the Member State have very different responsibilities as regards the implementation of security measures, it is essential for each Member State to put in place a national implementation programme that reflects the structure of its own institutions and to appoint a competent authority to ensure the necessary cooperation.
21. As requested by the European Council on 21 September 2001, the Community will therefore give itself the means to ensure civil aviation security through the following measures:
- control of access to sensitive areas of airports and aircraft;
- control of passengers and their hand luggage;
- control and monitoring of hold luggage;
- control of cargo and mail;
- training of ground staff;
- definition of specifications for the equipment for the above controls;
- classification of weapons and others items which it is prohibited to bring on to aircraft or into the sensitive areas of airports.
22. There may be exceptional cases, however, where the common measures are not fully suitable for dealing with a particular threat on certain flights. The Member States must therefore be able to take additional measures to deal with such events. As this must not unduly affect the uniformity recommended by the European Council, this flexibility must be subject to a Community control mechanism that allows the preventive measures applicable everywhere to be modified and enables any national variants which are no longer justified to terminated.
23. As stressed by the Council, the ECAC measures do not, however, take account of any change in the threat. Additional measures will therefore supplement the common standards as and when they are developed by the ECAC or any other international bodies that have started work on devising effective responses to any foreseeable threat.
24. Lastly, an effective system of control is needed which also helps to spread good practice. Even if it has only been tested on a small scale (only six checks have been made), the mechanism envisaged by the ECAC and which the Transport Council has asked us to promote throughout the world (conclusions of the Council of 14 September) constitutes a good basis for this purpose. The Member States must designate an authority to coordinate the implementation of the measures and to put in place a quality control system for each carrier and airfield. These systems will then be audited centrally by multinational teams of specially trained inspectors whose reports will enable the Member States to make up for any shortcomings and the Commission, if necessary, to fulfil its responsibilities as guardian of the Treaty. The Regulation should therefore lay the foundations for such a system of peer review, as requested by the European Council.
25. According to an initial evaluation in the financial statement attached to this proposal, an inspection body should be set up within the Commission with its own staff (of four) to provide back-up and logistical support for inspectors made available by the Member States from the competent authorities responsible for implementing national quality controls. These inspectors, in two teams of four, should be able to audit 70 to 80 airports a year, i.e. 20% of Community airports, enough to assess the implementation of the security measures and detect any shortcomings. The operating costs of this surveillance system (staff, training and mission expenses) should be divided between the Member States and the Community.
26. However, the urgency of the situation, as emphasised by the European Council, calls for the above control system to be set up immediately to check that the Member States are now applying all the measures in ECAC Document 30 in an effective manner, as they say they are. The Commission has therefore decided to take the measures required for this purpose in cooperation with the administrations concerned. It will set up a Member States' group of experts to work out the arrangements for these inspections and assign the necessary financial and human resources.
27. While the above measures will enable most of the European Council's requests to be met, those concerning crew training and cockpit access will require other legal instruments as they are not concerned with the preventive measures to be taken in airports. As indicated above, Commission proposals on these points are being examined by the Council and the European Parliament (see paragraph 8). Furthermore, thought will have to be given to the security of the telecommunications networks used by the various components of civil aviation, in particular the most sensitive ones such as air traffic management.
28. Finally, it must be pointed out that the Community can only legislate for the territory for which it is competent. It therefore cannot impose measures to be taken in third country airports for flights which land at Community airports or overfly the Member States. It will therefore be necessary to establish the bilateral or multilateral arrangements necessary to guarantee civil aviation security throughout the world. Action along these lines has already been taken by the ICAO at its last Assembly. The Community and the Member States, in agreement with the other European States which are members of the ICAO, have proposed that the standards laid down in Annex 17 to the Chicago Convention should be strengthened and that the ICAO should be given the powers to enable it to monitor their effective implementation, drawing on the work carried out along these lines in Europe. The Commission will propose the measures required to continue this action at all the necessary levels.
29. Without prejudice to the measures described here above, the development of future technologies would need to be pursued to allow for better prevention, as well as for new corrective measures to be implemented progressively. Research for technologies for better airport security equipment and secure aeronautical telecommunication networks, as well as technologies for airborne systems (e.g. comprehensive aircraft anti collision system i) should be initiated. A specific research activity will be included in the Sixth Framework Programme for RTD to support this. Future systems would have to be compatible with the growing need for air transportation.
Recent events show that all the Member States are now faced with the same terrorist threat and must therefore formulate a collective response by effectively and uniformly introducing common preventive measures based on the world of the ECAC.
This challenge can best be met by making use of the Community's powers that have already been proven in many other sectors in which similar problems have arisen and by taking action on aviation security as recommended by the European Council.
The Commission therefore asks the European Parliament and the Council to adopt the attached draft Regulation, which establishes common rules to ensure civil aviation security, gives the Commission the necessary powers to adopt the implementing measures that will facilitate their application and establishes a collective control mechanism for this application.
In parallel, the Commission will immediately set up a peer review of the effective and uniform application of air security measures. It will also propose measures to ensure the protection of European Union citizens throughout the world by means of appropriate bilateral or multilateral arrangements.