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INTERNATIONAL |
Saturday, September 24 2011 04:46 GMT+2
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Romania and Bulgaria denied entry to Schengen
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Finland and the Netherlands refused at a meeting of EU interior ministers to drop their opposition to the bids by the two Balkan nations to join the Schengen zone, citing poor progress against corruption and organized crime. The Polish interior minister Jerzy Miller says Romania and Bulgaria had been promised that, if they fulfilled all the requirements, they would be accepted into the free travel zone. Miller said Thursday that “the promise has been broken.” “This leads me to a rather sad conclusion regarding mutual trust among the member states,” told Miller adding that Romania and Bulgaria had made “huge progress.” But the Dutch and Finnish governments disagreed. “What we wanted to avoid was to take a decision today that we would later regret,” said Dutch Immigration Minister Gerd Leers. “Imagine you have a door with eight of the best locks in the world. But before that door is standing someone who lets everybody in -- then you have a problem,” he said.
Missing confidence
Finnish Interior Minister Paeivi Raesaenen said: “We don’t have complete confidence that these countries will be able to secure outer EU borders because of corruption, among other issues.”
Poland, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, sought to convince EU peers to accept a two-step solution that would allow Romanian and Bulgarian air and sea borders to open by October 31, while a date on opening land borders would be put off to next year. All nations backed the compromise except for the Dutch and Finnish ministers, diplomats said. No vote was taken, however, sending a decision to an EU summit in October, with Poland hoping to change Finnish and Dutch minds by then. Schengen, an area that stretches from Portugal to Poland and through which road, rail and even air travelers need only basic identity papers to move freely, has come under increasing strain this year. Denmark reintroduced limited customs controls recently, after a spat at the French-Italian border concerning Tunisians crossing by sea into Italy and then receiving papers allowing them to wander across the European mainland. But the latest row concerns the Dutch and Finnish resistance to the former Communist-bloc states in the east. After the Dutch indicated their likely stance in advance of Thursday’s talks, Romanian border authorities this week blocked Dutch trucks carrying tulips from the Netherlands -- officially over a bacteria scare.
A cornerstone of EU integration, Schengen is already facing a shake-up due to concerns over illegal migration. At its southeastern edge, Greece is struggling to police its border with Turkey and faces allegations that migrants live in inhumane conditions at detention centers. Fearing an influx of illegal migrants in the wake of the Arab Spring, several states sought more leeway to restore border controls on a temporary basis. EU home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem riled France, Germany and Spain with a proposal seeking to force states to ask permission from Brussels and other EU states to reinstate even temporary internal borders.
Compiled from AFP and AP stories by the Daily News staff.
READER COMMENTS
Guest - redcrow 2011-09-23 13:47:00 |
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Guest - harman 2011-09-23 09:49:05 |
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Guest - harman 2011-09-23 09:44:35 |
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Guest - A mistake to allow 2011-09-23 07:24:02 |
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Guest - Take consequences 2011-09-23 00:06:20 |
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