Croatia to close more chapters, but is urged to speed up reform

Stumbling blocks remain for Balkan country; Barroso calls for concrete results on judicial reform

Croatia will move closer to completing its negotiations to join the European Union on Tuesday (19 April), when it expects to conclude talks on regional policy and on agriculture.

This will leave the terms on just three policy areas to be agreed ahead of a final accession conference scheduled for June – possibly bringing to an end a process that started in 2005.

But the three remaining chapters – fisheries, competition policy and the judiciary – are among the toughest of the negotiations, and diplomats believe that Croatia might miss its self-imposed target of June for completing the talks.

Corruption and organised crime

The European Commission and some member states are not convinced that the government of Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor has made enough headway in the fight against corruption and organised crime, or in co-operating on war crimes investigations.

Gordan Jandrokovic´, Croatia’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, will attend Tuesday’s accession conference. The EU will be represented by Štefan Füle, the European commissioner for enlargement and neighbourhood policy, and János Martonyi, foreign minister of Hungary, the current holder of the rotating presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers.

On Friday (8 April), Füle and José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president,, went to Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, to hold talks with Kosor and the government. Barroso told parliamentarians there that the negotiations are now “reaching the final phase” and that their conclusion is “within reach”. “I am confident that my talks here today will help to provide extra momentum for the final efforts that still need to be done,” he said. He underlined, however, that “concrete, convincing and sustainable results” were required on judicial reform and the fight against corruption.

Election challenge

As the number of open chapters dwindles, the government can devote greater resources to those remaining open, a diplomat told European Voice. Kosor is personally co-ordinating the membership bid, and her political fortunes are closely linked to its success. Her centre-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) faces a tough challenge in a general election that is expected to take place before the end of the year.

Croatia will hold a referendum on joining the EU within a month of the accession treaty being signed. While few political parties are openly Eurosceptic, the opposition Social Democrats have accused the government of focusing too much on meeting EU demands in the midst of a sharp economic downturn.

Another aspect of Croatia’s bid to join the EU will reach some sort of conclusion tomorrow (15 April), when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague is scheduled to issue its verdict in a war-crimes case against three Croatian generals. The most prominent of the accused is Ante Gotovina, whose flight led to months of delay in starting Croatia’s membership talks. Croatia says that it has done all it can to co-operate with the ICTY, while others, notably the Netherlands, dispute this, demanding that all the ICTY’s requests for additional documentation be fulfilled.