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Commission Report (2002): Poland
One of the main challenges
still facing the candidate countries is the need to strengthen their
administrative capacity to implement and enforce the acquis. As of 1998, the
European Commission began to mobilise significant human and financial
resources to help them with this process, using the mechanism of twinning of
administrations and agencies. In 2001, the Commission strengthened this
emphasis on institution building further, through the launch of the Action
Plans for strengthening administrative and judicial capacity.
The twinning process makes the vast body of Member States' expertise
available to the candidate countries through the long-term secondment of
civil servants and accompanying short-term expert missions and training.
A total of 503 twinning projects were funded by the Community between 1998
and 2001. Between 1998 and 2000, these projects primarily targeted the main
priority sectors identified in the Accession Partnerships: agriculture, the
environment, public finance, justice and home affairs and preparation for the
management of Structural Funds. Since 2000, other important sectors of the
acquis have also been addressed through twinning such as social policy, the
fight against drugs, transport, and telecommunications regulation. Twinning
now covers all sectors of the acquis.
Thanks to the strong support of the EU Member States, 103 twinning
partnerships were funded by Phare 1998, involving all the candidate countries
and almost all the Member States. These first-generation projects have
already come to an end. Under Phare 1999 a further 123 projects are currently
being implemented and the programming exercise for Phare 2000 included a
further 146 twinning projects. The 2001 programming exercise includes 131
twinning projects embracing all the Phare beneficiary countries, as well as
Cyprus and Malta. Under the 2002 programming exercise, 119 twinning projects
have already been planned and approved for implementation. A substantial
number of additional twinning projects are planned, and these should be
approved and implementation launched before the end of 2002. They include
twinning projects identified in the Action Plans for strengthening
administrative and judicial capacity in the negotiating countries. It is
estimated that around 300 twinning projects are operational throughout the
candidate countries at any one time. Furthermore, the candidate countries are
being offered a further way of drawing on Member States' expertise
through Twinning light, a mechanism to address carefully-circumscribed
projects of limited scope which emerge during the negotiation process as
requiring adaptation.
For Poland, the eight 1998 twinning projects have been completed and 17
twinning projects under Phare 1999 are on-going and/or nearing completion.
New areas covered are inter alia, financial control, tax and customs, civil
service development, and road transport. Under Phare 2000, there are 44
twinning projects with Poland, all of which are currently on-going, including
twinning between regional administrations in order to prepare Poland for
regional policy and the management of future structural funds. Under Phare
2001, there are 39 twinning projects, of which 5 are ``twinning
light'' projects, some of which have started. For Phare 2002, there
will be34 .twinning project, of which 4 are ``twinning light'' Almost
all Member States are involved in Poland and a wide range of policy sectors
are covered by twinning in Poland.
© European Commission
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