Tighter controls needed before EU expands borders

Date: 11/11/1999

By Simon Coss

ALL the applicant states have been warned by the European Commission that serious improvements are needed in the way they police their borders and tackle organised crime and drug smuggling.

In its latest report on the candidates' progress towards EU membership, the Commission criticised all of them for failing to match up to the Union's tough justice and home affairs rules.

By far the biggest concern voiced both by the Commission and by the Union's existing 15 member states is that the applicants will not be able adequately to guard the EU's eastern external frontier when they join the bloc.

This point was stressed by Union leaders at this month's special justice and home affairs summit in Tampere, when they highlighted the urgent need for applicants to ensure their border guards were both properly trained and paid enough to ensure they could not be easily bribed. They also insisted that all the applicants would be expected to respect the rules of the Schengen free-movement zone when they joined the EU.

But while every candidate country recognises the need to upgrade its border controls, several of the poorer central and eastern European states, most notably Bulgaria and Romania, will face real difficulties finding the money to pay for the necessary improvements.

The Union's Phare programme and the recently agreed 'instrument for pre-accession' (ISPA) - a new pot of enlargement money - will go some way to helping these countries to meet their commitments. But the Commission has stressed that the lion's share of investment in border-control services must come from the applicant states themselves.

It is not only Bulgaria and Romania which face an uphill struggle to comply with the Union's justice and home affairs rules, as last month's Commission report showed only too clearly.

In Hungary, “the pace of alignment' in justice and home affairs was described as “slow'. The Commission also warned Poland that “the effectiveness of law enforcement bodies including police and border guards services requires substantial improvement” and noted that in Slovakia, “the establishment of relevant institutions has been delayed”.

Serious concerns were also expressed about the situation in Czech Republic, where “other than steps taken in the fight against drugs, efforts in the area of justice and home affairs have stalled”. Slovenia too came in for criticism for making “little progress” in judicial reforms.

The Commission was more positive about the pace of reform in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. But even here, the institution said far more progress was needed.