SLOVENIA: EU security chief says all 9 Schengen newcomers will be ready by December

The EU says the nine new EU members who will join the Schengen border-free zone will be ready to operate by December. The European Union Commissioner for Justice and Security told Balkan ministers on Friday (October 5) that all 9 new EU states are ready to join the Schengen zone in December. The EU's border-free zone is set to be extended to nine additional member states on December 21. From that date, people travelling from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia will be able to travel to the existing 15 states of the "Schengen" border-free zone without having to show their passports. The external EU borders will move to Belarus, Ukraine and Croatia. EU Commissioner for Justice and Security, Franco Frattini, was attending an EU - West Balkans Justice and Interior Ministers' meeting on Friday, where he said he was confident all 9 Schengen members were ready to start controlling the new EU external borders. In September, the Schengen newcomers were connected to a massive European police database, the Schengen Information System (SIS). After the meeting on Friday, ministers said they would extend cooperation between the EU and non EU countries in order to carry out better surveillance of border crossings. Slovenian Minister of Interior Affairs said Slovenian border police would do everything possible to minimize the waiting time at its busy crossings with Croatia --used by millions of travellers from Balkan countries and Turkey on their way to and from the EU. But he urged the countries that were still not using machine readable passports to start issuing them as soon as possible. "The police will be well organised, all crossing points will be open and we will be working to full capacity. Here I would like to emphasize something I already said before - it is important that all citizens from third countries which still don't use machine readable passports, change them as soon as possible. That will speed up crossing procedures," Dragutin Mate said. Thirteen EU countries, plus Norway and Iceland, are currently part of the border-free zone. Britain and Ireland have chosen not to be part of it. Cyprus, which also joined the EU in 2004, has asked for one year's delay. Romania and Bulgaria, which became EU members only this year, need to do more work to meet security criteria.

ITN Source | October 8, 2007

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