The expansion of Europe's passport-free travel area hit a road block on Thursday, with Bulgarian and Romanian dreams of joining the club rejected by nations critical of their crime-fighting records. Finland and the Netherlands refused at a meeting of EU interior ministers to drop their opposition to the bids by the two Balkan nations to join the Schengen zone, citing poor progress against corruption and organised crime.
"Two member states today made it impossible for us to make a decision on Schengen enlargement," Polish Interior Minister Jerzy Miller lamented after the talks. "This leads me to a rather sad conclusion regarding mutual trust among the member states," Miller added, saying Bulgaria and Romania were promised a place in Schengen when they joined the European Union in 2007. "Today the promise has been broken," he said, adding that Romania and Bulgaria had made "huge progress."
But the Dutch and Finnish governments disagreed. "Imagine you have a door with eight of the best locks in the world. But before that door is standing someone who lets everybody in - then you have a problem," he said. Finnish Interior Minister Paeivi Raesaenen said: "We don't have complete confidence that these countries will be able to secure outer EU borders because of corruption, among other issues."
Poland, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, sought to convince EU peers to accept a two-step solution that would allow Romanian and Bulgarian air and sea borders to open by October 31, while a date on opening land borders would be put off to next year. All nations backed the compromise except for the Dutch and Finnish ministers, diplomats said.