EU: New European Union members said yesterday they would tighten controls on the bloc's new eastern frontier and called for a special fund in the next EU budget to help them combat crime and terrorism threats.
Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary all became EU outposts on May 1st and together are responsible for protection of more than 2,270 miles of the EU's eastern and southern border.
"We all share the same challenges, fighting organised crime, illegal migration and terror threats, and we plan to closely co-operate on these," the Polish Deputy Interior Minister, Mr Pawel Dakowski, said after a working meeting of interior officials from the seven new EU members and Finland.
"We also agreed to jointly seek a creation of a border fund in the 2007-2013 budget, sharing the opinion that now is the time to talk about a plan to finance the EU's external borders from 2007 onwards," Mr Dakowski said.
Although passport controls continue at border crossings between the old and new members, routine customs checks ceased on May 1st, raising worries that any slippage at the new external border could mean trouble for the entire bloc.
The newcomers have received three-year EU funding to improve their often decrepit border infrastructure and security systems.
But they also want to seek a guarantee they will not be cut off from EU funds in 2007, when they all plan to join the EU's borderless zone created by the Schengen agreement, Mr Dakowski said.
"All the funds we get now we use for new investments," he said.
The eight countries said they would seek better intelligence-sharing, particularly in the face of global terror threats.
After the Madrid bombings in March, EU leaders called on their security services to increase co-operation. They will review the bloc's counterterrorism efforts at a summit in Brussels on June 17th-18th.