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BRUSSELS - The European Union agreed today to lift land and sea border controls on its mostly ex-communist new member states on December 31, 2007 and to end airport checks in March 2008.
The move will be with the proviso that the 10 new states, which joined the bloc in 2004, fulfil certain security and technical criteria and comes a few months after the original October 2007 target to bring down border checks.
"This decision means Europe will not stay divided in two categories of states, two categories of people," Czech Interior Minister Ivan Langer told reporters after ministers agreed the move at a meeting in Brussels.
The existing borderless area, the so-called "Schengen" area, includes the 13 old European Union member states plus Norway and Iceland but excludes Britain and Ireland. It has no internal border posts and checks.
The new states had been told earlier this year they would have to wait until 2009 because of delays in setting up a new database on stolen vehicles and police searches, aimed at boosting police cooperation in the borderless zone.
But they complained their citizens were being deprived of rights enjoyed by other member countries and ministers finally agreed to let all states access an existing database to allow for an earlier lifting of the border controls.
The new EU states will need to prove their borders with non-EU states are safe and that they are technically ready to work with the database, which diplomats from some old states say could yet create difficulties.
"It's too short, too tight," one envoy said.
Diplomats from some new member states had previously accused old EU countries of using technical hurdles as a pretext to delay the Schengen enlargement at a time of growing public fears about the impact of immigration.
The EU newcomers are Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Cypriot airports will only be ready to lift border checks in 2009, a Cypriot diplomat said.
At the same meeting, interior ministers urged African states to be more co-operative in the fight against illegal migration, with several insisting that was a precondition for the bloc being more open to legal migration from their shores.
"If we are to start giving voluntary quotas to African countries so that they can send migrants workers towards Europe, then they in turn should accept to take back their own citizens that have no right to stay on EU territory," Malta's Deputy Prime minister Tonio Borg said.
- REUTERS
