New states bid to stop Schengen delay

Six EU states will meet on the fringes of today’s (21 September) informal meeting of justice ministers to find ways to stop a delay of more than a year to the lifting of border and passport controls with new member states.

Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Austria will then lobby other justice ministers meeting in Tampere, Finland, to bring the date forward from possibly the beginning of 2009.

Tensions rose last week following confirmation that the ten new member states would not be able to join the Schengen area in October 2007 - a date agreed by EU leaders in June.

"We don’t exactly know why there is a delay. The key players are never telling the truth," said a Hungarian diplomat.

He said the six states would discuss changes to the testing phase of the new system to lessen the length of a delay. Problems, he added, lay with old member states not deploying the manpower to keep up with the original timetable and with the fact that lifting border controls would result in border officials in old member states losing their jobs.

But the European Commission has stressed that delays are of a technical or legal nature. Jonathan Faull, director-general for justice, freedom and security, has said delays have been caused in getting the main site in Strasbourg ready where the database for border information exchange will be housed. Court challenges by contractors who lost out in the tendering process to set up the new system and delays with introducing relevant legislation at EU level have also caused the project to over-run. The Commission has had problems with the contractors it hired to get the Schengen database up and running, said Faull.

Six EU states will meet on the fringes of today’s (21 September) informal meeting of justice ministers to find ways to stop a delay of more than a year to the lifting of border and passport controls with new member states.