The EU listed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania among 10 countries that should be ready for membership in time for the June 2004 European Parliament elections.
"It shows how hard we've worked and how far we've come in the past five years," said Andris Kesteris, Latvia's chief EU negotiator.
Annual progress reports released Oct. 10 gave the three Baltic states high marks for their political and economic achievements.
But the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said each country must still address key areas of concern, including corruption, judicial reforms, environmental issues, unemployment and social integration.
"It's not the time to start polishing the champagne glasses. It's not the end of the journey," Estonian Prime Minister Siim Kallas told reporters last week.
Estonia must address inefficiencies in its customs and fisheries, speed up hearings of court cases and do more to tackle unemployment, especially in the poor northeastern region along the Russian border where the jobless rate last month was 10.6 percent, nearly double the national figure of 5.5 percent.
The country must also pay continued attention to restructuring its oil-shale sector, on which it is dependent for nearly all its electricity needs.
Estonia and Latvia were lauded for removing barriers to naturalization for the countries' Russian-speaking minorities, with special mention made of Latvia's move to strike a law that required candidates for public office to prove Latvian proficiency.
But both countries were urged to spend more money on naturalization campaigns to encourage more people to naturalize.
Some 19 percent of Estonia's 1.4 million people and 22 percent of Latvia's 2.35 million remain non-citizens, most of them ethnic Russians.
Residents who moved to the two countries after 1940 and their descendants must pass language exams to win citizenship.
The rate of naturalization in both countries has remained slow as well despite several amendments to soften naturalization laws.
"It's a question of encouraging people, making them more interested and aware of the possibilities. You need a positive outreach program and that requires sufficient funding and political will," said Andrew Rasbash, head of the EU delegation to Latvia.
Some Russians in Latvia have called for letting non-citizens vote in municipal elections, a law already on the books in Estonia. Lawmakers from the left-wing opposition party For Human Rights in a United Latvia point out that once the country enters the EU, all citizens of any EU country who work in Latvia will be able to vote for their city or town councils.
But Kesteris said emphasizing the naturalization was more constructive than changing the law. "We have done a lot to relax the conditions for naturalization and rather than give out fragments of rights, non-citizens should make the minor effort and naturalize," he said.
Latvia and Lithuania were both urged to do more to reform weak judicial systems and fight corruption.
Lithuania must focus efforts on administrative corruption and improving the professional capabilities of judges and prosecutors while Latvia must cut down on long pretrial detention periods, especially for minors.
Corruption was cause "for serious concern" in Latvia, which was rated by international watchdog Transparency International as the second most corrupt EU candidate. Rumania ranked lower.
In this month's general election, Latvian voters seemed to be sending the same message, giving the most votes to ex-central banker Einars Repse's New Era party, which ran on an anti-corruption platform.
Repse is expected to become the next prime minister and will likely head a four-party coalition that includes three parties not represented in the current Saeima (Latvia's parliament) legislature."Certainly the election results do seem to show that the Latvian people are concerned about the issue of corruption, and that's encouraging," Rasbash said.
He also welcomed a decision by the outgoing Parliament to approve security police official Guntis Rutkis as head of a new anti-corruption bureau but said the office needed political support to succeed.
Repse had advocated hiring foreigners to staff the anti-corruption office and initially criticized the Parliament for rushing the vote on Rutkis, but his advisers have since said he is ready to work with the new chief.
"(The report) does not mean we can relax. We will have much to do in order to successfully conclude talks," said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Antanas Valionis.
All three countries say continued progress on the problem areas is crucial to wrap up negotiations ahead of the EU's year-end summit in Copenhagen.
But ultimately, that will depend on something that's not in the Baltics' hands: a weekend referendum in Ireland, where voters will be asked for the second time to endorse the treaty that prepares the EU for eastward enlargement.
Irish voters last year rejected the Nice Treaty, named after the French resort town in which it was signed, and a second "no" vote would scrap it and send the EU back to the drawing board. Officials in Brussels have warned it could set the process back at least two years.
"All the focus now is on concluding talks in December, and if there's a delay, that momentum will be lost," said Kesteris. "That's the most dangerous thing."
Please enter your username and password.
2024 © The Baltic Times /Cookies Policy
