European Commission: Strategy Paper and Report 2003

Monitoring and safeguards

The Commission has been closely monitoring how candidate countries are meeting their commitments made in the accession negotiations. It is highly important that the commitments undertaken by the future Member States in the framework of the accession negotiations be implemented as foreseen. In order to assess precisely this situation, the Commission will continue to monitor this closely until the signature of the Treaty and report on this to the Council on the basis of current procedures.

The Regular Reports identify areas where further efforts are required. The Commission will continue the monitoring process also between the signature of the Treaty and accession. This continuous monitoring, which will also include the monitoring of the implementation of the Action Plans, should be done through established channels such as the structures of the Association Agreements.

The Commission will, building on its present practice, signal any delays or problems in economic reform or the fulfilment of commitments, in particular through early warning letters at a political level.

Specific targeted actions such as high level groups in the field of food safety, or on the introduction of extended decentralisation as well as peer reviews, technical meetings, workshops, seminars and questionnaires will continue to be used in specific fields until accession.

For economic matters, candidate countries are continuing to prepare for EMU's multilateral surveillance and economic policy co-ordination. They are participating in the Pre-accession Fiscal Surveillance Procedure (PFSP) which has three components -- the fiscal notification, the pre-accession economic programme and the multilateral dialogue. The PFSP has started in spring 2001 and will continue also until accession.

All relevant information resulting from these activities will be pulled together in monitoring reports presented regularly to the Council Six months before the accession date, the Commission will produce a comprehensive Monitoring Report, which will look at the advancement of the implementation of necessary reforms and all commitments in the field of the Community acquis by each of the acceding countries. This comprehensive Monitoring Report will be, for the ten acceding countries, a precursor of the Annual Report on the Monitoring of the Application of the Community Law, issued regularly by the Commission for all Member States At the latest in July 2003, the Commission will assess the implementation of commitments necessary for the programming of structural funds.

After accession, the Commission, in its role as guardian of the treaties, will continue to check how the acquis is implemented by the new Member States, using the same mechanisms as those applied to the existing Member States. These include in particular benchmarking, peer pressure, annual reporting on implementation of Community law and the launching of infringement procedures with the European Court of Justice if necessary. In the specific area of nuclear safety, the Laeken European Council envisaged the need to monitor the security and safety of nuclear power stations in the Union.

The Accession Treaty will, as in the previous enlargement, contain a general economic safeguard clause. This clause is already being discussed in the Council drafting group of the Treaty on the basis of a text modelled on Art. 152 of the Act of Accession for Austria, Finland and Sweden. As the acceding countries do not form part of the European Economic Area, the Commission considers that the duration of the validity of the safeguard clause should be two years and not one year, as in the previous enlargement.

This general economic safeguard clause applies to situations where ``difficulties arise which are serious and liable to persist in any sector of the economy or which could bring about serious deterioration in the economic situation of a given area''. The safeguard clause would allow the Commission to determine the necessary protective measures.

Both, new and current Member States would be able to make use of this safeguard clause. The draft text, as in the previous enlargement, specifies that the protective measures ``shall not entail frontier controls''.

The safeguard clause does not cater for situations, which, on the one hand, are due to failure to comply with accession obligations, and on the other hand, which may have serious non-economic consequences such as for the protection of health or life of humans, animals or plants, protection of intellectual property or general reasons of public policy as defined in Art 30 EC Treaty. For these cases, either Art. 30 of the EC Treaty applies, or specific safeguard clauses may have been introduced into specific sectoral legislation according to Art 95, para. 10 EC Treaty.

However, in a number of cases, the Community legislation either does not contain a safeguard clause or the safeguard clause does not cover the specific situations arising from enlargement. The Commission therefore considers that the Accession Treaty should as a precautionary measure envisage the introduction of a specific internal market related safeguard mechanism.

Such a mechanism could be based on the following elements:

• The mechanism should be implemented by the Commission on request of a Member State or on its own initiative.
• The Commission should be authorised to take the decisions on the necessary measures. The measures should be proportional and limited in time.
• The scope should be limited to a serious breach of the functioning of the internal market or an imminent risk of such breach and should also cater for particular situations in respect of food safety.
• The mechanism should be triggered where the Commission establishes a failure to meet the commitments made by the new Member States in the context of the accession negotiations.
• During the period of application of the measures, the new Member State concerned shall provide regular information to the Commission on steps taken to redress the breach. The measures should be lifted as soon as the Commission has determined that the breach has been redressed .
• The safeguard clause should only exist for a limited time span. The possibility to invoke the internal market safeguard mechanism should be limited to 2 years.

The comprehensive Monitoring Report will identify any areas where, in the absence of remedial action, such safeguard measures may be considered. This would also allow to give an early warning before membership. Moreover, until accession, the safeguard clauses under the Association Agreements will remain applicable.

In this context, the particular situation in the area of Justice and Home Affairs deserves a special mention. Unlike at the time of the last enlargement, there is now a considerable acquis in this area, and it is still evolving as the process of implementation of the Amsterdam Treaty and the Tampere European Council conclusions continues. It covers difficult and politically sensitive subjects, in particular where the freedom of movement of people and the consequences of the suppression of internal frontiers are concerned. As explained in paragraph 3.5.3 below, the implementation of these Schengen-based objectives is subject to a two-stage process, which eliminates the need for any separate safeguard mechanism. There are, however, other non-Schengen components in the area of freedom, security and justice (for instance regarding the implementation of judicial co-operation, in particular mutual recognition) where the monitoring process may indicate a need for a sui generis safeguard clause to address any serious breach or a threat of a serious breach in the functioning of this area, by e.g. providing for a temporary suspension of mutual recognition provisions.

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