§ Mr. BercowTo ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will list the acquis of the Schengen agreement that has not been deposited in the Library. [64189]
§ Kate HoeyI have been asked to reply.
The Schengen acquis will not be defined definitively until the Amsterdam Treaty enters into force, at which point the Council of Ministers will be invited to adopt two Decisions defining the acquis and allocating a European Union legal base to each Schengen measure. Draft versions of these Decisions, with Explanatory Memoranda, were submitted to the House and copied to the Library on 21 May 1998. Of course, the acquis will continue to grow as the Schengen Executive Committee will continue to adopt instruments right up to the entry into force of Amsterdam.
The Government have also placed in the Library copies of the 1985 Schengen Agreement, the 1990 Schengen Convention and the Accession Protocols and all the Decisions and Declarations of the Schengen Executive Committee covering the period up to and including June 1997 which are in our possession, except for six documents which are classified as "Confidential". Some of these documents are incomplete and there are others which we have not yet received: these are indicated in the list which accompanies the documents deposited in the Library. We are endeavouring to obtain the missing documents and hope to deposit a further set of texts up to and including measures adopted in the first half of 1998 in the Library in the New Year.