FINLAND: Current EU President Finland's Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen says he is quite confident that Romania has made clear progress towards EU entry

Prospects for an early accession date for Romania and Bulgaria's membership to the European Union rose on Tuesday (September 5, 2006) when EU President, Finland's Prime Minister, Matti Vanhanen, said he was confident Bucharest had made clear progress towards EU entry in 2007. Vanhanen's statement came after talks with his Romanian counterpart, Calin Popescu-Tariceanu in Helsinki. Vanhanen also promised to open the Finnish labour market to workers from Bulgaria and Romania once they join the EU, this is the first such declaration from a member state. "I can say that we can trust and we can be very confident that the Commission's evaluation will be fair. Both countries, Romania and Bulgaria they got detailed list in the last monitoring report and now it is time to make by piece by piece to evaluate how the, how the, both countries has implemented their rules and which kind of progress they have got. And what I discussed today with the prime minister, I was quite confident, confident that Romania has made real progress," Vanhanen said. European Commission spokeswoman Krisztina Nagy said no decision has been made on when the two countries would join the bloc, saying they were in the final stage of preparing a report, but that it is too early to draw any conclusions. The Commission will make the recommendation on September 26 and the 25 EU member states are likely to give the final green light in October for the bloc's second enlargement wave into ex-communist eastern Europe. But the two Balkan countries may be excluded initially from some EU policies in areas where they are not fully prepared for membership, such as the fight against corruption and organised crime. In the UK a possible influx of unqualified workers from Romania and Bulgaria seeking better wages and living standards have spurred a national debate. But Popescu-Tariceanu assured this would not be the case during his visit to Finland. "We will not see quite many Romanians deciding to to go Westwards, to other West European countries to to work," Popescu-Tariceanu said.

ITN Source | September 6, 2006

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