Today's Date:

The fight against illegal immigration is of vital national importance requiring both resoluteness and firmness, and this is what underpins the proposals I am going to put to President Chirac and the Prime Minister in a few days' time.

In this battle, we need Europe and are fortunate to have it:

- Fortunate because it's helpful for the implementation of a major policy of cooperation with immigrant source countries.

- Fortunate because of the cooperation policy on Europe's borders, with a country like Romania for example, we are leading the way, we have sent liaison officers there to work alongside German, Austrian and, in the future, Spanish liaison officers.

- From 1 May, the external borders agency, the European Border Agency, will allow us to do even more.

In the way of cooperation at European external borders as well as its internal ones, with two essential tools:

- First: joint patrols and joint investigation teams;

- Second: police and customs cooperation councils, allowing us, here too, determinedly to (...) cooperate with Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium. We are seeing the results of this in the battle against terrorism, for example against ETA.

So a great deal is at stake in the referendum, since in order to go further in this area of illegal immigration we need to move from deciding matters unanimously to voting by qualified majority.

This is what the draft Constitutional Treaty offers. So by answering "yes" to this draft Treaty, you are giving us the means to go further in the battle against illegal immigration./.