The date January 26 was chosen to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Customs Cooperation Council ( now known as the World Customs Organization or WCO for short).

Following a decade of international negotiations, the new system has been harmonized with those of other trading nations under the auspices of an intergovernmental agency, the Customs Cooperation Council, which is based in Brussels.

"It is getting much worse," said Maciek Lubik, a senior Polish customs officer and the regional director of the Customs Cooperation Council, a Brussels-based organization, about drug smuggling in Eastern Europe.

Maciej Lubik, an official of the Brussels-based Customs Cooperation Council, which coordinates the work of European custom agencies, said the police had arrested a Pole and a Latin American for drug smuggling.

In 1961 the World Customs Organization (WCO), then known as the Customs Cooperation Council (CCC), adopted the "Customs Convention on the ATA Carnet for the Temporary Admission of Goods."

The original valuation regulation was, however, in fact derived from the 1950 Customs Cooperation Council Valuation Convention and this gave rise to a dispute referred to the European Court in the Massey-Ferguson case, as to the legitimacy of using Article 235 in these circumstances.

It was therefore held by the Court that the fact that all the Member States had signed the Customs Cooperation Council Valuation Convention would not lead to the necessary extent to the uniform determination of the value for customs purposes of imported goods required for the functioning of customs union.