Croatia signs accession treaty

Date of 1 July 2013 set for Croatia to be 28th member.

Croatia is set to join the European Union on 1 July 2013 after President Ivo Josipovic and Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor signed its treaty of accession on the sidelines of the summit on Friday (9 December). 

Croatia is now on course to be the first country in six years to join the EU, after Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. After Slovenia, which joined in 2004, Croatia will be only the second EU member state out of the seven republics that emerged from the rubble of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Friday’s signing ceremony set in motion a ratification process that will start with a referendum in Croatia, expected to take place early in 2012, and will extend across national procedures in the member states over the following months. Until it becomes a full member, Croatia will be able to attend EU meetings as an observer.

Kosor said that Friday was a “historic moment” for her country, following six years of negotiations plagued by worries over domestic reform and co-operation with a United Nations war-crimes tribunal, and a border dispute with Slovenia that added almost a year to the talks.

Elections

The ceremony came just days after Kosor’s Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), in power for much of Croatia’s 20-year history as an independent state, lost a parliamentary election to the opposition Social Democrats (SDP).

Zoran Milanovic, the leader of the SDP, which won a landslide victory, is expected in the coming days to receive from Josipovic a mandate to form a government.

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, said that Croatia had demonstrated that it met the “strict conditions of the enlargement process” and that this should be seen as a “clear signal” to other Balkan countries, including Serbia and Montenegro, that the EU remains open to further expansion.

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