On 7 June, the European Customs Union celebrated its 40th anniversary in the Brussels Berlaymont building.
The EU Customs Union means:
- No customs duties at internal borders between the EU Member States;
- Common customs duties on imports from outside the EU;
- Common rules of origin for products from outside the EU;
- A common definition of customs value.
Agreement on these four principles between the six founder Member States ( Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) led to completion of the Customs Union on 1 July 1968, one and a half years earlier than planned in the 1957 Treaty of Rome.
After 1 July 1968 drafting of the Community customs legislation was pushed forward to make sure that wherever goods are imported into the EU, the same rules are applied. A legal framework was established covering such important points as:
- Ensuring that the common tariff is applied in the same way all along the EU’s external borders;
- Introducing a common approach on warehousing procedures;
- Facilitating movements of goods in “customs transit”;
- Replacing the wide variety of customs documents with a single administrative document.
All the rules on the above-mentioned points were finally brought together in a single piece of legislation, the Community Customs Code, which was adopted in 1992.
An improved version of TARIC, the EU’s online customs tariff data base, is now available in 21 languages. It offers new search functions, relating to the type of measures applicable to a product or a chapter and to certain tariff quota; the type of measures applicable during a certain period; and the regulations that are linked to the measures or the EU Official Journal; as well as the possibility to display more than one product code at the same time.