Fishing dispute imperils Croatia’s EU-entry bid

The foreign ministers of Slovenia and Croatia will meet this weekend (8-10 February) in a bid to avert a complete breakdown in bilateral relations and generate momentum for Croatia’s membership talks with the European Union.

Croatia hopes to wrap up its accession negotiations early next year and to enter the Union in 2011, but the talks are currently stalled over a protected fishing zone that Croatia has established in the Adriatic. The EU expects Croatia to abolish the zone, known by its Croatian acronym as ZERP, or to suspend its application to EU vessels.

The Slovenian and Croat foreign ministers will have talks on the fringes of a security conference in Munich.

So far, Croatia, in its membership negotiations with the EU, has opened 16 of the 35 policy areas, or ‘chapters’, that will need to be settled before admission. Of these, two - on science and research and on education and culture - have been closed provisionally. Several more could be opened during the Slovenian presidency. But lacklustre progress on the substance and the quarrel over the ZERP could yet derail that schedule.

Lengthy coalition talks following last November’s election - incumbent Prime Minister Ivo Sanader was confirmed in office only this January - have added to Croatia’s trouble. Sanader has now ordered his administration to tackle the toughest reforms in the coming months.

Many of the outstanding chapters can only be opened once certain benchmarks are met, which means that practical progress has to be demonstrated. This notably applies in the case of judicial reform and the fight against corruption. Time for such measures may now be running out.

Hinting at this, a spokeswoman for Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn, said that 2008 was "a crucial year" for Croatia’s membership bid. She also reiterated the EU’s demand that the ZERP be suspended or abolished.

Austrian Socialist MEP Hannes Swoboda recently warned Croatia that it needed to accelerate reform or risk having its accession application caught up in the appointment of a new Commission and in elections for the European Parliament, to take place in 2009.

Swoboda monitors Croatia’s progress on behalf of the foreign affairs committee, which discussed his report on Croatia on 29 January.

Addressing the session, Croatia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Drobnjak, put some of the blame on the EU. He expressed his "disappointment" with the slow verification of benchmarks. He said that they should not be "misused as a means to prolong, block or filibuster the process". "Unfortunately, this is exactly what has been happening in some chapters," he said.

Croatia accuses its neighbour Slovenia of blocking the opening of additional chapters in order to get Zagreb to suspend its ZERP.

Croatia declared the ZERP in 2003 and agreed the following year to suspend its application to vessels from EU member states. But the Croatian government believes that this agreement no longer applies because Slovenia and Italy proclaimed their own zones, in 2005 and 2006 respectively, and Sanader has said repeatedly that he has no intention of suspending the zone as demanded by the EU.

Dimitrij Rupel, Slovenia’s foreign minister, told the Slovenian news agency STA that it was "possible" that accession talks would be frozen at the next meeting of EU foreign ministers on 18 February but he expressed his hope that a solution could be found before then. "Contacts in the last few days have been very intensive," Rupel said on 29 January. The forthcoming meeting with his Croatian counterpart, Gordan Jandrokovic, might yet recreate some of the lost momentum in Croatia’s EU aspirations.

The foreign ministers of Slovenia and Croatia will meet this weekend (8-10 February) in a bid to avert a complete breakdown in bilateral relations and generate momentum for Croatia’s membership talks with the European Union.