By Lena Unbehauen - 26th September 2006
European commission plans to delay the extension of the EU’s Schengen borderless area to include the new member states have been dubbed as political rather than technical.
Brussels has said the new Schengen area will not become a reality until late 2009 – two years after the initial deadline for including the 10 new member states.
The commission has blamed the delay on technical problems in setting up the so-called SIS II control system, which links national passport and other databases.
But many central and eastern EU members claim the real reasons for postponing the new system are political – many old member states simply do not want to allow free access to travellers from the eastern EU.
Jan Kohout, Czech ambassador to the EU dismissed the commission’s excuses for the delay – problems with the construction and the air conditioning in the building housing the SIS II computers – as “simply strange”.
“Schengen is a political project. Technical problems are secondary,” Kohout said, according to the German media, adding that he believed that many of the old EU members lacked the “good will” to solve the problem.
The Czech diplomat accused the commission of bias towards some of the old member states, suggesting that the newcomers were being treated as “second class”.
“We have a kind of fortress Europe, with a separate first floor for Schengen countries, and a citadel for the countries in monetary union,” Kohout said.
The commission has rejected these accusations, however. “It is time to stop these childish and unnecessary conspiracy theories,” a spokesman told the EUobserver.
Several of the new member states plan to put the Schengen debate back on the agenda at the next meeting of EU justice and home affairs ministers on October 5.
A possible compromise, proposed by Portugal, would be that the new EU members could simply join the existing SIS I database until the second-generation version is ready.
But there is division even among the new member states, with some such as the Czech Republic prepared to accept a compromise while others, such as Estonia, believe it would be too costly.
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