OFF THE WIRE

Getting the Foreign vote

Lithuania amended the country's constitution on June 20 to allow foreign residents to vote in municipal elections, as part of its preparations to join the European Union. A total 105 MPs out of 141 voted for the legislation, which will allow foreigners residing in Lithuania to vote and be elected in local elections from 2006. Foreign residents will be allowed to become mayors, vice-mayors and members of local councils.

The amendments also extend the mandate of local councils from three to four years. The ruling coalition plans to twin the next municipal elections with the presidential elections on Dec. 22 this year. (Agence France-Presse)

Nationalist election strategy

Latvia's Green Party and the Latvian Farmers Union are considering paying for a lawyer for cyclist Juris Silovs, recently convicted in Lithuania. Silovs has been serving sentence in Praveniski prison near Kaunas since April 11 since a court sentenced him to five-and-a-half years for failing to declare a large amount of cash while crossing the border from Lithuania.

Latvia's Green Party co-chairman Indulis Emsis said that the "greens" and "farmers" will set out a defense of Latvian nationals convicted abroad as one item in their pre-election campaign. (Baltic News Service)

Watery border

Estonia's Foreign Minister Kristiina Ojuland and Russian Ambassador to Tallinn Konstantin Provalov have signed an intergovernmental agreement on border crossing points essential for launching boat services between the city of Tartu in eastern Estonia and Pskov in the northwest of Russia. The agreement, signed June 25, designates seven international and five bilateral checkpoints, those for the Pskov-Tartu service included. According to the treaty, which took effect from the moment of signing, the checkpoint for the Tartu-Pskov line is situated at Praaga in the estuary of the Emajogi River. (BNS)

Pickpocket of politicians

Speaker of the Swedish Parliament Birgitta Dahl, 64, who was on an official visit to Estonia this week, fell victim to pickpockets in Tallinn's Old Town on June 19. The theft took place when Dahl was taking a walk with her Estonian-born husband after a festive dinner given by Speaker of the Estonian Parliament Toomas Savi. Dahl discovered two hours later that her handbag was open and her purse was gone. There are no suspects. Although Dahl closed her account immediately, the thief had managed to take out more than 26,000 kroons ($1,600) from her bank account. "The victim carried a slip of paper with her bank card's PIN code in her purse," police said. (BNS)

Convicted journalists

Two journalists with a Belarus regional newspaper were sentenced to up to two-and-a-half years' community service after a court found them guilty of slandering authoritarian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The sentences handed out on Pavel Mozheiko and Nikolai Markevich were more lenient than the jail terms the prosecutor in the case had been demanding, but the men's lawyer slammed the trial as political.

"This is without doubt a politically motivated decision. It is anti-constitutional and flies in the face of constitutional norms and guarantees," said defense lawyer Sergei Tsurko after the verdict was read out in the court in Grodno, western Belarus. Mozheiko, 23, is a reporter on the Pagonya newspaper, and Markevich, 39, is the editor. (AFP)

Slavic divorce

Relations between Moscow and Minsk have shown a marked deterioration as Russian President Vladimir Putin's pro-Western policy clashes with the Soviet-style leadership of his Belarusian counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Both leaders have voiced fast-growing differences over plans to reinforce a largely theoretical union between their countries.

The row reached a peak on June 25 with the authoritarian Lukashenka blasting Putin - Minsk's only ally in Europe - after the Russian president had criticized him for allegedly trying to restore the Soviet Union, an unrealistic and dangerous objective in Moscow's view. Lukashenka accused Putin of "insulting the Belarusian people."

Some Kremlin advisers fear Lukashenka is eyeing closer union with its richer neighbor Russia as a way for rescuing Belarus from a precarious economic position. (AFP)

Ignalina projects

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has released 130 million euros ($125 million) from an international fund to shut down the Ignalina nuclear power plant that will be used to finance three projects, the Lithuanian Economy Ministry said on June 20.

Under the agreement, signed in London the day before, the money is to finance construction of new storage space for nuclear waste, a new boiler and the modernization of a technical archive. The EBRD-managed fund to finance the shut-down was established in 2000 at an international donors conference, which raised around 203 million euros.

Vilnius estimates the total cost of closure at some 3 billion euros. (AFP)

Angst for EU candidates as clock ticks toward expansion deadline

By Janet McEvoy, AFP SEVILLE

European Union leaders set the clock ticking toward the conclusion of eastward enlargement talks by the end of the year during a weekend summit. But front-running candidates expressed worry the timetable would slip because of national concerns.

Meeting in Seville in southern Spain for a two-day summit, the 15-nation bloc's leaders maintained a timetable culminating in 2004 for their historic expansion into the former communist bloc but warned candidates they had a lot of work to do to get to the EU on time.

Under the timetable established last year, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta are expected to wrap up talks by the end of this year and enter the bloc in 2004.

The exercise, taking EU membership to 25 from 15, will create a giant bloc embracing new countries from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean.

Romania and Bulgaria, two impoverished ex-communist countries on the Black Sea, are expected to join later.

However, suggestions on the margins of the Seville meeting that Germany might demand a delay of a decisive October EU summit have sent panic waves around aspirant nations, which fear the EU will slip in its own preparations, just as time is running out.

Germany, the major contributor to the EU's budget, has reportedly asked for the October summit meeting to be delayed in order to avoid broaching sensitive money issues, including agricultural subsidies for Eastern European countries, ahead of its September elections.

That summit is supposed to set the scene for a final decision at an end-year summit in Copenhagen.

Slovenian Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel said that Spanish Prime Minister Josï Marôa Aznar had acknowledged the summit might indeed be moved to early November.

He said he was worried that the EU, by delaying its internal

decisions, might give little time for real negotiations.

"My concern is that we will be presented with the common positions very late, that we will be told to take it or leave it," he said.

"There will be very little time to have negotiations."

In a sign of how tough those negotiations will be, Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller dug in his heels at a news conference on the sidelines of the summit maintaining Poland's stance that it wants full EU aid for its farmers from the day it joins the EU.

Farm subsidies account for nearly half of the EU budget, with about 40 billion euros ($38 billion) paid each year to farmers under the common agricultural policy.

Under a proposal from the European Commission, farmers in new EU member states would get only a quarter of what their counterparts in the incumbent nations receive in subsidies.

That proportion would go up to 100 percent over 10 years, but by then the common agricultural policy is expected to be much less generous as the EU aims to scale back farm aid.

The EU and the candidate countries still have to get to the heart of negotiations on agriculture, which are expected to be the most difficult part of the enlargement discussions.

Those talks are expected to be particularly tough with Poland, which has a massive farming sector. As the largest and most populous candidate country, EU member states are seen as unlikely to allow the expansion to go ahead without it. So a delay for Poland would be a delay for all.

As the end-year deadline nears, the EU will be on the lookout for any slippage in the hopefuls' own preparations.