Brussels, 11/10/2002 (Agence Europe) - The Minister-President of the Land of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber, sent the presidents of the European Commission and European Parliament, Romano Prodi and Pat Cox, as well as the chair of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, Elmar Brok and Chancellor Schroeder, an opinion by two legal experts - Prof. Rudolf Dolzer of the University of Bonn, and Prof. Martin Nettesheim, of the university of Eberhard-Karls di Tubingen - on the compatibility with European law of the Benes Decrees that led to the expulsion of Sudeten Germans and Hungarians from Slovakia. The Benes Decrees must be repealed if the Czech Republic wants to join the Union, says Stoiber, resting his case on these opinions, which reach opposite conclusions to those of the Frowein opinion commissioned by the European Parliament, and according to which the decrees are not an impediment to the Czech Republic's membership of the EU (see EUROPE of 5 October, p.7 and 9 October, p.4, for another legal opinion condemned by the CSU member of the EP and chair of the German association of Sudeten Germans, Bernd Posselt). In his letter to Cox, Prodi and Schroeder, Edmund Stoiber states that the future Member states must know that the Union is also a "community of values in which expulsion has not place". European institutions must "act so that the Czech Republic eradicates the existing obstacles to accession", and "this obligation also goes for the German government", says the unfortunate rival to Gerhard Schroeder in the last German elections.
You may recall that the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee will discuss these issues at a special session in Strasbourg on 21 October, on the fringe of the plenary session.