Bulgaria And Romania Bids To Join Schengen Zone Blocked
By KUNA
Finland and the Netherlands Thursday vetoed the entry of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union’s border-free Schengen area.
“Two member states made it impossible to adopt the decision of the extension of the Schengen space,” Polish interior minister Jerzy Miller told a press conference here after a meeting of EU interior ministers.
Poland holds the current EU Presidency.
“This leads me to rather sad conclusions concerning the mutual trust amongst the (twenty-five) Member-States,” he said.
Miller stressed that “We are dealing here with a very important principle concerning the Schengen area: the freedom of movement.”
“When you ask an average European citizen what is the main advantage of the EU, the freedom of movement is one of the things they would mention first”, he noted.
Bulgaria and Romania were promised that if they fulfil all the requirements of the EU membership trety they will be accepted into the Schengen area.
“So today, the promise included in the accession Treaty has been broken,” added the Polish minister.
For their part, the Finnish and Dutch interior ministers said that the two countries had not done enough to fight corruption and organised crime and could not yet be trusted to join the 25-member Schengen area.
