France wants to postpone Romania and Bulgaria’s Schengen entry

France will make sure that the EU decision on the Bulgarian and Romanian entry in the Schengen Area is not made before the summer, France’s Minister for European Affairs, Pierre Lellouche, has announced.

Lellouche told the European Affairs Committee in the French National Assembly on Wednesday that the EU has to be very vigilant towards the Schengen Agreement accession of Bulgaria and Romania, which hope to join the area in March 2011.

In the minister’s words, the expansion of the Schengen Area should not be an automatic result from the process of technical evaluation of the candidate’s progress, which has been running for two years.

Lellouche said that France supports the Netherlands, which has called for postponement of the decision on Bulgaria and Romania’s Schengen accession at least until the release of the annual reports on the two countries by the European Commission in the summer of 2011 under the so called Cooperation and Verification Mechanism designed for monitoring the post-EU accession progress of the two countries that joined the Union in 2007.

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