The European Commission expects Croatia to meet seven of the 10 tasks identified in the European Commission's monitoring report this past autumn, until the release of the next monitoring report this spring, and it also expects that Croatia will fulfill the remaining three tasks until 1 July, when the country is due to join the European Union, an official in the Directorate General for Enlargement in the European Commission, Dirk Lange, told the European Parliament's committee on foreign affairs in Brussels on Tuesday.
According to our estimates, three of those ten items will be more difficult to meet, and those are the shipbuilding sector, border crossings at Neum (Bosnia and Herzegovina's coastal town) and the translation of the acquis communautaire into the Croatian language, said Langue, who is in charge of Croatia.
We are talking about the matters which Croatia may not meet one hundred percent by the spring report, Lange said.
According to him, the Commission is due to release on 21 March a final monitoring report on the three chapters: Competition Policy, Judiciary and Fundamental Rights and on Freedom, Justice and Security. The Commission is now analysing information it has obtained from Croatia about the job it has so done in meeting the ten tasks identified in the last report.
Lange recalled that last week Croatia's Foreign and European Affairs Minister Vesna Pusic met Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele and that the Commissioner expressed satisfaction with what he had been told and with progress achieved so far. The Commissioner also encouraged the Croatian government to continue with the remaining tasks, Lange added.
As for the shipbuilding sector, Lange said that Monday's meeting between Croatian Economy Minister Ivan Vrdoljak and the European Commissioner for Competition, Joaquin Almunia, resulted in an agreement about the privatisation of Brodosplit.
If the matter is brought to completion before the report is issued, we will be able to note progress in that report, the EC official told the EP committee.
As for the construction of border crossing facilities at Neum, the work has been launched and the European Commission expects the completion of the facilities by Croatia's entry into the EU, according to Lange.
The third difficult matter is the translation of the acquis into Croatian.
The Croatian language will become an official language in the EU and it is Croatia's duty to translate the acquis into Croatian, said Langue, who is hopeful of the completion of that task by the day of Croatia's scheduled admission to the 27-strong bloc.
