EU law and order power struggle baffles applicants

Date: 02/04/1998

By Simon Coss

THE EU is in danger of sending a confused message to the countries of central and eastern Europe on sensitive issues such as drug smuggling, immigration and organised crime, warn justice and home affairs experts.

EU officials argue that so many European Commission departments and national ministries want to influence the justice and home affairs (JHA) elements of the enlargement negotiations that there is a danger of several poorly coordinated policies being pursued at the same time.

"The problem is that there is no real coherence. The Commission has been trying to start things and the member states are pursuing the same sorts of initiatives," said one.

The Union's justice ministers reiterated their demand to be involved in the enlargement talks when they met in Brussels last month. While recognising the primary role of foreign ministers in the negotiations, they insisted that they should be "closely involved" in identifying which JHA laws the applicant states would have to abide by. They also called for the right to send their officials on fact-finding missions to the central and eastern European countries (CEECs).

In addition to competition within governments, there are also two Commission departments tasked with assessing the CEECs' ability to match up to Union rules in this area.

Swedish Commissioner Anita Gradin's small JHA task force is vying with Hans van den Broek's much larger Directorate-General for external political relations (DGIA), which is leading enlargement negotiations.

"There is competition on all levels, between DGIA and Gradin's task force and between the ministers. There is quite a lot of confusion," said one EU expert.

DGIA officials reject this interpretation. "There is a lack of information passing between the foreign ministers and the JHA ministers, but the Commission is now in line," said one.

At a high-level meeting of national justice experts in London last week, member states "almost" managed to agree on just what the Union's JHA rules were. But the effectiveness of even this small step forward is debatable.

As the Commission pointed out in a report published in February, the EU laws (acquis) in this area are difficult to define and are always changing.

"Any acquis presented to the candidate countries today is likely to look very different by the time the first new member joins the Union," stated the report.

Gradin's officials also argue that it will be difficult to persuade the applicants to meet the Union's JHA rules while existing EU governments show a reluctance to respect them.

The JHA lawmaking structure was created by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Under the system, binding legislation, usually in the form of conventions, has to be ratified by all 15 national parliaments.

Since Maastricht entered into force, only one convention has actually been approved and that was a non-JHA deal struck before the treaty was signed.

At present, a pile of unratified agreements on subjects such as the operation of the Europol police agency, customs cooperation and the fight against fraud is still waiting to be processed by national legislatures.

"Not a single one of these conventions has been ratified and that's a scandal," said one Gradin aide. "If we had a nice Community acquis in these areas, then the CEECs would have something to which they could adjust. Instead, they come to us scratching their heads and saying 'what do you want us to do?'."

Experts warn that the EU is in danger of sending a confused message to the CEEC countries on JHA issues.