Pressure grows for progress in justice and home affairs

Date: 29/06/2000

By John Shelley

If pre-presidency bluster is anything to go by, EU watchers could be forgiven for thinking that Paris is planning to do little in the fields of justice, crime and immigration. They would be mistaken.

Although France has not said much about how it intends to further the goal of creating a common area of freedom, security and justice, the timing of its presidency will leave it little choice.

The first anniversary of the landmark Tampere justice summit will fall during Paris' term at the helm and with it will come the expectation that progress will have been made on a whole range of issues.

French Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement may not have a particularly strong personal agenda to push, but he will be very busy just keeping up with the flow. "It will mostly be a case of plodding through the work, although the French do have some priorities of their own," said one diplomat.

These priorities will be measures to beef up the Union's fight against money laundering and action on immigration, notably drawing up proposals to harmonise reception facilities and application processing for asylum seekers.

Paris is also expected to table and hopefully get agreement on setting up a cross-border network of prosecutors and magistrates, Eurojust, to complement the EU's criminal intelligence agency Europol. In addition, it will try to draw up an action plan on getting mutual recognition of court judgements. This would mean, for example, that an order to freeze a criminal's assets in one country would apply across the Union.

Another area where France will be hoping to make progress is in setting up joint investigative teams between police forces co-ordinated by Europol.

This may all add up to a very busy period for diplomats but, in the glory stakes, it could prove very profitable for Paris. As the fundamentals were agreed in Tampere in October last year, the French should be able to get much of the work approved by member states without much of a fight. "We always get disagreement over points of detail but Tampere itself was very consensual," said one diplomat. "The agreements were reached there so we do not expect major points of principal to arise."

The lack of a particular French axe to grind might also help them get their plans through. On the asylum issue, for example, Paris is expected to opt for minimum standards rather than the complete harmonisation of asylum procedures which the Benelux countries and the Commission favour.

By not pushing for a bold approach, it will greatly enhance its chances of success and boost hopes of a productive six months' work in the justice and home affairs field.

Article forms part of a survey on the French EU Presidency, July-December 2000.