WCO CHIEF OUTLINES GOALS FOR CUSTOMS AGENCIES

WCO CHIEF OUTLINES GOALS FOR CUSTOMS AGENCIES    The World Customs Organization Secretary General Michel Danet said one of customs agencies’ biggest challenges in the new century will be operating in the Internet and electronic commerce environments.
   “A world without frontiers is not a world without laws and regulations,” Danet said during Customs Day at the Brussels-based WCO on Friday. “Our societies and our economies will not allow globalization to be transformed into a jungle ruled by law of the strongest.”
   More than ever, customs agencies must perform environmental and social protection work to ensure compliance with international conventions which will take effect in the next few years.
   “However, Customs will also have to go on playing its part in the campaign against organized crime — which, for its part, knows no frontiers — and in combating the illicit traffic in drugs, nuclear waste, endangered species, counterfeit goods and cultural property which is supplying a huge black market,” Danet said.
   In this new environment customs agencies will also have to “strike the right balance between facilitation and controls” and promote the use of computer technology. “Customs services will have to achieve greater efficiency in the development of new approaches to intelligence and targeting,” he said.
   Danet added that “Customs administrations will have to commit themselves resolutely to a policy of partnership with other government services, with the economic operators and with all those who make civil society, in order to be able to respond comprehensively to all those demands made upon them.”