Bulgaria Will Eventually Join Schengen Area - Dutch Ambassador

In a Tuesday interview for the BGNES news agency, Dutch Ambassador to Bulgaria Karel van Kesteren said that Bulgaria would eventually join the Schengen area but refused to commit to a concrete deadline. Photo by BGNES

The Netherlands expects to see the progress report of the European Commission on Bulgaria in December before taking a decision on the country's Schengen bid, according to Dutch Ambassador to Bulgaria Karel van Kesteren.

In a Tuesday interview for the BGNES news agency, he said that Bulgaria would eventually join the Schengen area but refused to commit to a concrete deadline.

Karel van Kesteren and Filip Gunev, Bulgaria's Deputy Interior Minister, attended Tuesday the presentation of a project of the International Organization for Migration to be implemented in Bulgaria over the next three years thanks to the financial support of the Dutch government.

During the presentation, Gunev voiced hopes that by the time the project was completed, Bulgaria would be a Schengen Member State.

"We are experiencing difficulties with a large number of illegal immigrants coming to the Netherlands because our country has a good and generous social security system. We have no way of accommodating one billion people, so the migration flows must be restricted and rules must be put in place, which is  not easy," the Dutch Ambassador to Bulgaria stated.

"We have a lot of immigrants from Afghanistan, Somalia and other countries," he said, adding that countries guarding EU's external border were experiencing problems with immigrants and the best way to resolve these issues was through joint efforts.

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