News
Releases
José Manuel Barroso
No. 82/05
October 04, 2005
THE EUROPEAN UNION OPENS ACCESSION NEGOTIATIONS WITH CROATIA
EU Member States decided in Luxemburg on 3 October to launch
accession negotiations with
Croatia.
The opening of the accession negotiations was made possible by the
assessment of the Council of Ministers that Croatia was fully cooperating
with the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
set up by the UN. This assessment by the Council was based on a report by
the ICTY Chief Prosecutor Del Ponte which outlined the progress that
Croatia had made over recent months.
Expressing his pleasure at the opening of negotiations, European
Commission President
Barroso
said: “I am very pleased that accession negotiations with Croatia will
start. I look forward to working closely with our Croatian partners on the
many and varied issues which will inevitably come up in the negotiations.”
The European Commissioner for
Enlargement, Mr.
Olli Rehn, said: “I am
very pleased that Croatia has responded positively to the need to fully
cooperate with the Tribunal. In line with what I have said on many
occasions, I am delighted that we have been able to decide on opening the
negotiations as soon as this condition was met by Croatia: it goes without
saying that Croatia must maintain this degree of cooperation with the
Tribunal, leading to the resolution of the one remaining issue, namely,
the location, arrest and transfer of General Ante Gotovina to the Hague.”
After the holding of the first Inter-Governmental Conference the next step
will be to start examining with the Croatian authorities the EU
acquis
communautaire so
as to see where the Croatian legal framework and administrative capacity
need to be adapted so that Croatia can apply EU law as a Member State –
the so-called “screening” exercise. This exercise, covering all 35
Chapters of the acquis, will take about a year to complete.
Croatia
Further Contact Information
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