Brussels, 01/03/2012 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 1 March, the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, made it clear that the Netherlands still opposes the idea of Romania and Bulgaria joining the Schengen area, a matter which the EU27 was due to discuss at the summit later that day. Rutte made his views clear in the morning in a meeting with the head of the S&D Group at the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, and repeated it later on the fringes of a summit of the European liberal party.
Rutte says that the decision to allow the two countries to join Schengen would require positive reports from the European Commission as part of the verification and cooperation mechanisms (VCM), which examine progress in terms of fighting corruption and introducing judicial reforms. The next VCM report is due to be published in July.
Rutte said after his meeting with Schulz that the two countries had not done enough to introduce Schengen standards and that the Netherlands did not oppose their membership per se, but would not agree until solid guarantees were provided.
At the meeting with the liberals, the Dutch leaders said that given all the border problems with Greece, it was a matter of knowing whether Bulgaria and Romania will be capable of introducing all the Schengen preconditions across their countries in a timely fashion.
On Thursday evening, the EU27 are expected to try and reach a decision, or at least publish a conclusions document pointing out the need for problems to be solved in the very near future, but on Thursday afternoon were not expected to try and reach new compromises apart from the idea of a joining Schengen in two stages. Earlier in the week, Romania threatened to veto Serbia's official status as an EU accession country in retaliation against the Dutch opposition to it joining Schengen at the moment. Bucharest has called for extra guarantees from Serbia for the Romanian minority living in Serbia. These expressions of anger will have little impact on the Dutch, and a face-saver was found for Romania on Thursday morning. The Commission has promised Romania that it will be closely monitoring implementation of Serbian legislation protecting the rights of its Romanian minority. (SP/transl.fl)