President Ivo Josipovic said on Saturday that a projected and desired target date for Croatia's entry into the European Union was January 1, 2013, adding that it was an "ambitious, yet attainable goal".
"It's very ambitious, because we are very close to concluding the negotiations. It takes a couple of months to prepare the treaties for signing, which will be followed by a possibly lengthy process of ratification because some countries have even longer procedures in their parliaments," Josipovic told reporters after seeing the exhibition "Pompeii - Life in the Shadow of Vesuvius" in the Klovicevi Dvori Gallery in Zagreb.
When asked to comment on the US State Department's annual report on human rights in Croatia, which warned that the government was frequently at the centre of corruption cases and highlighted problems relating to domestic violence and freedom of peaceful assembly, Josipovic said that "we here are aware of all that and are working to make things better."
Josipovic said that a lot of corruption cases were being investigated, noting that the word "government" referred to the administration as a whole and not just to the Cabinet.
"We see that many high-level officials and directors of various institutions are under serious investigation, which means that Croatia is fighting corruption and that's positive," the President said.
He said that domestic violence was a serious problem, as was violence at sporting events, expressing hope that such cases would be reduced to the minimum, as has been achieved by other democratic countries.
Commenting on the government's proposal to change the boundaries of electoral districts, Josipovic said that the Constitutional Court's decision that drew attention to the disproportion of constituencies should not be an excuse for an illogical redistricting that would bring into question the democratic nature of elections.
Josipovic said that the only basis for creating a new election system and new electoral districts should be updated voter lists, stressing that the voter lists should have been sorted long ago. He expressed hope that the next government would deal with that problem at the very start of its term, because any last-minute changes in that regard were not good and did not look convincing.
