Front runners embark on fresh round of enlargement talks

Date: 15/04/1999

By Simon Taylor

DIPLOMATS are hoping to make further progress in the long and exhausting process of negotiating terms of entry for the six leading applicants for EU membership at a meeting in Brussels next week.

EU ambassadors will meet their negotiating counterparts from the candidate countries next Monday (19 April) to try to reach agreement on five more areas of Union legislation.

The session will be devoted to talks on telecommunications policy, consumer and health protection, industrial policy, fisheries and statistics. It will be the first formal round of negotiations since the meeting chaired by the Austrian presidency last November which produced provisional agreement with all six candidates in just three policy areas.

On telecoms, officials say they will approve Hungary's plea for an extra year, following accession, in which to liberalise its market fully. But Poland will be asked to withdraw its request for a delay before it is required to free up access to mobile phone frequencies, with Union governments arguing that this can be done without its depriving Poland's military of key transmission bands.

Cyprus will also be told to withdraw its appeal for extra time to liberalise its telecoms sector because the EU believes it should be able to comply with the Union's rules by 2003.

In the arena of consumer policy, officials say the Union accepts that most of the applicant countries will comply fully with its rules by the time they join.

Budapest has, however, asked for more time to implement EU rules on the value of goods which must be covered by consumer guarantees, claiming that the current Union level is too high in view of lower incomes in Hungary. EU governments have asked Budapest for proof that the existing threshold would cause problems for Hungarian consumers before they decide whether to approve the request.

In the fisheries sector, the EU will call on five of the six applicants (excluding the Czech Republic) to provide more evidence that they will have the necessary administrative and legislative structure in place to enforce the Common Fisheries Policy's extensive rules.

Following next week's talks, the German presidency is planning to hold a further ambassadorial-level negotiating session on 19 May followed by a ministerial meeting on 22 June which will try to push the negotiations as far as possible.

Officials hope that the May meeting will be able to tackle the chapters on customs union, company law and external relations.

These areas are likely to pose more problems than those addressed so far because they raise a number of tricky issues.

Company law, for example, involves questions such as intellectual property rights and patent law which will be crucial for companies to ensure that their branded goods are adequately protected in the new member states. External relations pose problems because several of the applicant countries have special trade deals with neighbouring countries which the EU will want them to dismantle.

Applicant countries are also hoping that they can start negotiations on two more difficult areas: competition and the free movement of goods.

But EU officials say that the Union is taking a long time to draw up its position on these subjects, and warn that unless EU governments agree on a common approach in the next couple of weeks, negotiations on these chapters might be delayed until Finland takes over the Union presidency in July.