EU: Bulgaria and Romania yesterday received the green light to join the EU in January, but the European Commission imposed its toughest restrictions to force the two countries to intensify the fight against crime and corruption.
The former Warsaw Pact countries were warned they would be excluded from core areas of the EU - in justice and home affairs - if they failed to introduce greater reforms of their criminal justice systems.
In a report laying bare how far Romania and Bulgaria lag behind the eight other former communist countries which joined the EU in 2004, the commission warns that "immediate corrective action" is needed to avoid penalties.
"I think it would be difficult to sell [ their EU membership] if there were not accompanying measures that were strict and credible," said José Manuel Barroso, the commission's president.
His remarks highlighted how carefully the commission is treading amid countries' unease over the expansion of the union. Mr Barroso responded to this "enlargement fatigue" by warning that the EU could not admit any more members after Romania and Bulgaria until it had worked out what to do with the moribund EU constitution.
The commission attempted to allay a key criticism of enlargement - that new members are slipped in without proper tests - by setting benchmarks for Romania and Bulgaria. Unless progress was made by the end of March, "safeguard measures" were to be imposed allowing other EU countries to disregard court rulings and warrants from Bulgaria and Romania. Benchmarks were set in the commission's monitoring report which said progress had been made but much still remained.
The strongest criticism was reserved for Bulgaria, where "insufficient progress had been made to tackle corruption and organised crime, and to reform the criminal justice system". The report says: "Contract killings . . . rarely result in successful investigations and prosecutions. Illegal possession of firearms remains a problem. The number of cases prosecuted successfully related to trafficking of human beings, drug smuggling, money laundering, counterfeiting of goods, currency and documents is still low." As for Romania: "A consistent interpretation and application of the law . . . throughout the country has not been fully ensured."
Many in Brussels believe the two nations are not ready to join the EU.
The Bulgarian prime minister, Sergey Stanishev, said yesterday: "This is the genuine and final fall of the Berlin Wall for Bulgaria."