France: Bulgaria, Romania Not Fit for Schengen Entry March 2011

Bulgaria and Romania are not ready to join the Schengen Agreement in March 2011, as the two countries have hoped, according to France, a spokesperson of the French Foreign Ministry said.

France prefers to wait until the summer of 2011 for a decision on Bulgaria and Romania's Schengen entry, announced Bernard Valero, Foreign Ministry spokesperson, at a briefing in Paris, reported BGNES citing international media.

The announcement confirms France's intention to block the accession of Bulgaria and Romania, the latest EU entrants, to the borderless Schengen Area, which was first indicated Wednesday by France's Minister for European Affairs, Pierre Lellouche.

"Bulgaria and Romania of course have all prerequisites to join the Schengen Area but the conditions for their accession in March are not right. We believe that it is more prodent to wait until July when the European Commission will present its report for their progress under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM)," Valero stated on Friday.

He reminded that in its 2010 CVM report about the post-accession progress of Bulgaria and Romania in their problem areas, the EC found that there are improvements but that more was yet to be done.

"An objective, independent, and efficient administrative and court system with sufficient funds is needed in order to provide the good functioning of the EU policies, and to provide the EU citizens with access to all benefits and opportunities offered by their EU accession," the spokesperson of the French Foreign Ministry stated.

On Wednesday, France's EU Affairs Minister Pierre Lellouche told the European Affairs Committee in the French National Assembly that the expansion of the Schengen Area should not be an automatic result from the process of technical evaluation of the candidate's progress, which has been running for two years.

Lellouche said that France supports the Netherlands, which has called for postponement of the decision on Bulgaria and Romania's Schengen accession  at least until the release of the annual reports on the two countries by the European Commission in the summer of 2011 under the so called Cooperation and Verification Mechanism designed for monitoring the post-EU accession progress of the two countries that joined the Union in 2007.

He also said that the problems lie in the real and effective surveillance of the external borders of the EU and the fight against corruption. In his words, the regular reports are create concern.

The French minister also mentioned the increased influx of illegal immigrants from Turkey into Bulgaria and from Moldova into Romania, thus raising doubts about the capabilities of Bulgaria and Romania to guard the external EU borders.

In his words, the quasi state of Transnistria in Eastern Moldova is a "black hole" and the high levels of corruption in neighboring Ukraine are also worrying.

As France started a campaign to crack down on illegal settlements of Bulgarian and Romanian Roma, and to expel those to their home countries over the past few months, politicians in Sofia and Bucharest have been increasingly concerned with the possibility that France might blockade their country's accession to the no-passport control Schengen Area.

Even though the Roma issue is technically not related to the Schengen criteria, it has created tensions, especially between Paris and Bucharest. The Borisov government in Sofia, on ther other hand, sought to keep the Roma deportation a low profile affair, and has even suggested that it did not mind being decoupled from Romania in its quest to join the Schengen Agreement.

With Friday's statement of the French Foreign Ministry spokesperson confirming the words of the French EU Affairs Minister, it seems safe to conclude with a high degree of certainty that France will block accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the borderless Schengen Area in the first half of 2011. If France has its way, the decision about the two countries' Schengen accession will not be made until after July 2010.