Thursday 28th of March 2024, 14:46 CET
Romania and Bulgaria to join EU in 2007; No Date for Turkey
October 4, 2002
Reuters

Written by Yves Clarisse
Posted by HW on March 28, 2024

The European Commission will recommend next week that 10 candidate countries should join the European Union in 2004 but will propose no date for Turkey to start accession talks, an EU source said Friday.

The 10 are Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta. The EU executive will propose a target date of 2007 for Romania and Bulgaria to join the bloc, the source said.

Despite strong U.S. pressure, the Commission will not recommend giving Turkey, the 13th candidate, a date for starting entry negotiations, though it will also not prejudge a final decision by EU leaders when they meet for their big "enlargement summit" in Copenhagen in December, the source said.

The Commission's regular report on the aspirants, due out next Wednesday, will call for strict monitoring of candidates' implementation of EU law after entry negotiations are concluded in December and the treaty is signed next April.

"They (the candidates) have been carrying out reforms for 10 years. They will continue to make reforms but it will be within the EU, not outside it," the source said.

Many EU diplomats fear that the mostly impoverished, ex-communist candidates will still be unable to meet the bloc's tough standards on a wide range of issues from food hygiene to state aid even after they join the Union.

SAFEGUARD MEASURES

The Commission will seek the power to impose safeguard measures to protect the markets of member states in the first two or three years of membership if accession distorts the EU's internal market for some products, the source said.

The EU had similar safeguards but of only one year during the last enlargement which brought Austria, Sweden and Finland into the bloc in 1995, but they were never invoked.

The source said the Commission would submit a regular monitoring report to EU ministers until accession, spelling out specific problems of implementation in the candidate countries.

The Commission would also issue a final assessment report on the 10 new members' state of preparedness for membership about four months before they join in 2004.

Bulgaria and Romania, the poorest of the 12 negotiating candidates, will be given a target date of 2007, but the Commission will not spell out exactly when they can conclude negotiations as this depends on their own efforts.

TURKEY, CYPRUS

Turkey will win praise for a recent flurry of reforms, which include abolition of the death penalty in peacetime and more cultural rights for its Kurdish minority in a bid to persuade EU leaders to grant it a date for starting accession talks when they meet in Copenhagen in December.

"Turkey has made more progress in the past couple of months than it did in the last few decades," the source said.

Turkey, a mostly Muslim nation of 68 million, finally won EU candidate status in 1999 after knocking on Europe's door for decades but does not yet satisfy the human rights or economic criteria for opening accession talks.

The United States has long wanted the EU to admit Turkey, a key NATO ally whose geostrategic importance has again come back into sharp focus because of the Iraq crisis. But many in the EU feel Turkey is simply too big and too different to be absorbed.

Ankara, which faces a general election on November 3, is also a key player in the ongoing U.N.-mediated peace talks on Cyprus. Turkey is the only country to recognize the breakaway Turkish Cypriot statelet in the north of the island.

The EU says it wants Cyprus to join as a reunited island but is ready to take in only the internationally recognized Greek Cypriot part of the island in the absence of any agreement.

The source said the report would make no distinction between Cyprus and the other front-ranking candidates despite the lack of progress in the peace talks. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is due to present a Cyprus peace proposal next month.
 
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