Brussels, 08/11/2007 (Agence Europe) - Enlargement of the Schengen Area to nine new EU countries might after all prove possible before the end of the year, as planned, explained the EU27 interior ministers at a Justice and Internal Affairs Council meeting in Brussels on Thursday 8 November attended by the Icelandic and Norwegian interior ministers. The process of lifting controls at sea and land borders will start on 21 December 2007, and border controls will be lifted at international airports from 30 March 2008 onwards for nine of the 10 new member states which joined the EU in 2004 (Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic - not Cyprus). This will allow people to freely circulate without border controls in a Schengen Area extended to cover 3.6 million square kilometres. Only Cyprus decided to postpone joining Schengen and diplomatic sources suggest this may be due to the special border problems faced by Cyprus at the green line with the northern part of the island. Switzerland may join Schengen towards the end of next year. Evaluations of Bulgaria and Romania will start in the second half of 2008 and their Schengen Area accession process will take two years or so to complete.
The Portuguese Presidency is delighted to have been able to achieve such a positive outcome following its taking an early lead by announcing the date of enlargement of Schengen to nine new member states back in October (see EUROPE 9536). The EU27 ministers did not decide to immediately lift border controls but have made a strong political commitment by noting that the member states concerned meet the preconditions for the scrapping of border controls along the EU's internal borders. The formal decision to lift border controls will not be taken until after the European Parliament has given its opinion at the plenary in Strasbourg on 15 November 2007. The Council of the EU will then endorse the decision and it will be for the European Council of 12 and 13 December to crack open the champagne, as a diplomat put it. The extension of Schengen to the nine new countries will then be celebrated with great pomp and circumstance because the Portuguese Presidency is planning to hold an aircraft marathon on 21 and 22 December 2007 between different border crossings in four different areas - between the Baltic States and Finland; between Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic; between Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic; and between Italy and Slovenia. All the EU27's internal ministers will be invited by the Portuguese prime minister Jose Socrates to take part, along with the heads of state of the countries in question.
The document adopted by the ministers notes that the nine new member states have demonstrated sufficient preparedness to satisfactorily meet the two criteria set down for joining the 15 countries which are already members of the Schengen Area (the old 15 EU member states (minus Ireland and the UK), Norway and Iceland). The first criterion has been met since 1 September 2007 when the countries in question connected up with the Schengen Information System (SIS), a sophisticated IT database enabling security services to gain access to information about people, objects or vehicles they are seeking. The second was the positive assessment of security at the countries' external EU borders (border posts, 'green frontiers', railway crossings, the issuing of visas, police cooperation, etc). In order to make the assessment, experts regularly travelled to the countries in question throughout this year to see whether the shortcomings observed in the first report (published at the end of 2006) had been solved. The experts noted that the authorities in each country had been able to fill the gaps highlighted in the first assessment report, also welcoming remarkable progress by Slovakia in monitoring its land border with Ukraine, one of the main weaknesses detected at the end of 2006. The only member state still being criticised is Estonia. The report notes that the number of Estonian border guards is continuing to slump, giving rise to concern among the assessment committee members about Estonia's capacity to carry out high-level border controls. While the outstanding questions have to be addressed, they should not pose an obstacle to the member states concerned becoming full members of the Schengen Area, notes the report.
Schengen is the name of a small village in Luxembourg on the geographical crossroads between Germany, Benelux and France, where the Schengen Agreement and the Schengen Convention were signed in 1985 and 1990 respectively. Schengen is an EU instrument to facilitate the movement of people by scrapping internal EU border controls. Citizens also get the right to freely circulate within the Schengen Area and this is of great economic benefit, boosting tourism for example. At the same time, Schengen cooperation aims to protect individuals and their goods through strengthened cooperation among police forces, customs authorities and the authorities responsible for the external borders of all EU member states. These new forms of cooperation were introduced to compensate for any possible danger of security failings surrounding the scrapping of internal borders. (B.C.)