EU leaders agreed today to tighten planned safeguards aimed at protecting the Union's internal market after eastern enlargement by extending them to three years from two years, diplomats said.
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The safeguards would allow any EU country to ask the executive European Commission to authorise a ban or limits on imports of a product if a given economic sector was threatened because of enlargement.
The diplomats said European Union leaders meeting in Brussels agreed the move partly to placate the Netherlands, whose caretaker government is under parliamentary pressure to ensure that enlargement does not disrupt the EU internal market.
The measures will be extended to all areas of the internal market with cross-border implications as well as to the area of justice and home affairs where some EU states fear an increase in illegal immigration after enlargement.
The EU leaders gave the go-ahead today to plans to wind up negotiations with 10, mostly impoverished, ex-communist candidates in December, allowing them to join in 2004. The safeguards would kick in from 2004.
France and Germany clinched a deal last night on curbing farm spending after 2007.
EU president Denmark hailed the accord as a "breakthrough".
"I am confident the [Danish] presidency will get a mandate for the final negotiations," Danish Prime Minister Mr Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. "But there is still a lot of work to do. The negotiations are not finished. . . . But I think we have the basis for a compromise".
Swedish Prime Minister Mr Goran Persson warned the Franco-German deal might prove unacceptable to some countries seeking a radical overhaul of the costly Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which eats up half of the EU's annual budget.
The 10 applicant states set to close talks in December and to join the bloc in 2004 are Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroeder and French President Mr Jacques Chirac agreed that direct farm payments to new member states should be phased in from 2004, while overall farm spending would be frozen in real terms from 2007 at around €45 billion.