Region: Shut out

The two newest members of the European Union will remain outside of the Schengen zone as the Dutch and Finnish governments remain unconvinced that Bulgaria and Romania have proven themselves sufficiently capable of fighting corruption and organized crime.

At a Sept. 21 meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels, representatives from Finland and the Netherlands said Bulgaria and Romania would create a security threat to the rest of the bloc's 25-member travel area.

"What we wanted to avoid was to take a decision that we would later regret," Dutch Immigration Minister Gerd Leers said after the meeting. "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."

Finland's Interior Minister Päivi Räsänen said admitting Bulgaria and Romania into the Schengen zone would put other member countries at risk if the two nations could not be trusted to effectively police their borders.

"We don't have complete confidence that these countries will be able to secure outer EU borders because of corruption and other issues," he told reporters.

A vast majority of EU member states support the two countries' entrance into the 25-country, border-free travel zone, which stretches from Portugal to Poland. The Schengen zone, named after the village in Luxembourg where the original agreement was signed in 1985, includes three non-EU members: Iceland, Switzerland and Norway. Aside from Bulgaria and Romania, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Cyprus are the only EU countries not currently included in the Schengen area, which allows travelers over land, air and water to enter member countries with only basic identification.

The EU has remained an advocate of Bulgaria and Romania joining the travel area despite its executive body, the European Commission, releasing a report in July effectively agreeing with the Dutch and Finnish governments. The report, which was released as part of a monitoring system placed on both countries as a condition of their 2007 accession to the EU, concluded that the two nations were criticized as having judicial systems that were soft on corruption and organized crime. Similar reports have been released each year since 2007, with another one due in February 2012.

Broken promise

Poland, which currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, had secured the support of most nations for a two-phased compromise scenario in which it would first lift border checks in the countries' air and sea borders, while still imposing checks at land borders until next year. Polish Interior Minister Jerzy Miller said the rejection of Bulgaria and Romania represents a "broken promise" to both countries, which were assured they would be allowed to join the Schengen region if they showed progress in strengthening their judicial systems.

"It should be emphasized that both Bulgaria and Romania have made remarkable progress in the fight against corruption and organized crime," he said. "This evokes in me above all rather sad conclusions on mutual trust between EU member states. When Bulgaria and Romania signed the accession treaties, they were given a promise that if they fulfilled the defined conditions, they would become members of the Schengen area."

Government officials in both countries lashed out at the decision, with Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov threatening in a national radio interview to make EU decision-making more difficult.

"Bulgaria is a member state of the European Union. We have a stance on every subject discussed in the European council, and there are many policies which cannot be implemented without our cooperation," he said. "We must not allow our nationals to be treated like second-class citizens."

Meanwhile, Romania has taken a quieter, but more direct, approach to protesting the decision. Just days before the Brussels meeting on the country's entry into the Schengen zone, Romanian authorities Sept. 17 and 18 blocked several shipments of flowers imported from The Netherlands, which they claimed were suspected of being contaminated with a "dangerous bacteria." The day before the first shipments were blocked, the Netherlands announced publicly it planned to veto Romania's entry to the travel area.

Then, two days after the country's Schengen entry was denied, Romania President Traian Basescu said he planned to "take very serious measures" to check Dutch cheese imports into the country, as well.

The Schengen issue is expected to be discussed at October's EU Summit in Warsaw, but officials in the Netherlands and Finland have said they doubt anything could happen between now and then that could change their minds.

Jack Buehrer can be reached at
jbuehrer@praguepost.com