6 - 12 January 2000

Mini-screening process prior to EU accession talks

by Ivan Brincat

The talks between the European Commission and Malta to take place in the first days of February will be mini-screening sessions prior to the start of the official negotiations, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry told The Malta Business Weekly yesterday.

The Malta Foreign Ministry said that the dates carried in yesterday's issue of The Malta Independent were not the official start of negotiations but mini-screening sessions aimed at looking at any new legislation of the acquis communautaire prior to the start of negotiations.

However, the timetable, published in yesterday's The Malta Independent came from the Europa server, which is the official website of the European Union.

The timetable for the bilateral screening was under a large banner headline - Negotiations - and included all the meetings which will take place in February with all 12 applicant countries including the six which started negotiations in 1998, that is Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Hungary and Cyprus.

The Malta Foreign Ministry said the meetings being held in the first weeks of February will focus on any new legislation which came into force after the cut-off date normally used by the European Commission or 31 December 1998.

Moreover, they will also focus on the progress which was registered by each country since the screening session on the particular topic had taken place.

The Malta Foreign Ministry said that the meetings will this time involve a small number of persons and not large delegations as was the case with the screening process. The screening process with Malta comes to an end with the Agriculture chapter later this month.

The spokesman said that the chapters which will be discussed are not directly linked to the first chapters which will be open at the start of the official negotiations.

Officially, the negotiations will start in a ceremony to be held in Brussels.

However, the chapters mentioned in the Europa server are identical to those which had been opened for the previous six countries who started negotiations in 1998.

The eight chapters are Audio Visual Policy, Education and Training, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Science and Research, Consumer and Health Protection, Common Foreign and Security Policy, Small and Medium-sized undertakings and Industrial Policy.

At the Helsinki summit, the European Council had decided that negotiations with Malta and the other five applicant countries, namely Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria, would start next month.