FESTIVAL KANZUNETTA GHALL-EWROPA 2001

The Commission progress report published only last week has been a timely boost for all candidate countries, not least for Malta which saw its significant efforts in progressing towards preparedness for membership duly acknowledged. Malta has registered progress in most areas as can be noted in the report, not just in terms of the fundamentals of economic and fiscal policy but also in terms of aligning local legislation with the standards laid down in the acquis. Less progress was registered in some important areas such as environment and agriculture and this too has been noted; although it must be said that attention will be turning to these areas very shortly.

It must be said that the process of preparing a country for EU membership is a mammoth task, certainly unprecedented in the history of legal and economic evolution in our country. It did not take the Commission report to point this out. Locally, since last February, we have been following our National Plan for the Adoption of the Acquis, known as the NPAA, which is nothing short of a veritable plan of action for modernising our country. The plan lists in minute details short and medium term action and encompasses mechanisms which can assess progress on an ongoing basis.

The NPAA covers all areas of the acquis, dealing with issues ranging from intellectual property rights and the fight against piracy to competition issues, and from trade issues to transport, energy policy, fisheries, consumer protection, social policy, training and education. In each case, we have listed specific measures and action to be taken over a clearly defined period of time. This plan will lead to a number of benefits for Maltese citizens, some of which ought to be highlighted here:

1. It will give Maltese citizens a set of new laws that takes on the EU model as a benchmark. Some may consider that taking on EU standards may mean "succumbing to Brussels". I say that we are only taking a common-sense approach towards upgrading our standards without having to re-invent the wheel;

2. The NPAA will give Maltese citizens a new set of clearly defined and concrete rights in a number of areas;

• in the area of consumer protection, Maltese citizens will benefit from higher levels of protection with new rights related to advertising, door-to-door and distance-selling, guarantees and the like;

• in the area of social policy, Maltese workers shall benefit from better working conditions thanks to higher standards in labour law as well as a host of new laws to protect workers' health and safety at the workplace;

• in the area of the environment, new laws shall raise standards ranging from the quality of drinking water, bathing water, improved liquid and solid waste management and tougher standards on air quality and noise pollution.

1. In all these areas, the new impetus for law-making that is part of Malta's EU accession process also brings with it an added obligation to ensure that laws are not only put in the statute books but are also enforced on the ground. And it is this aspect which is probably the most difficult but, on the other hand, most welcome by the men and women in the street. People do not just want us to adopt EU standards. More importantly, they want us to enforce them. That is where the tangible gain will be felt. In this regard, the NPAA itself is a clear action plan for the structures that need to be put in place in order to ensure that Malta will have the administrative capacity and infrastructure to enforce the laws that are currently being enacted.

2. This year marked Malta's full engagement into a number of EU programmes, particularly the education programme, Socrates, the training programme, Leonardo da Vinci and the Fifth Framework Programme for Research and Techonological Development, the FP5. By early next year, Malta will also be effectively engaged in the Youth programme as well as in Culture 2000.

Visible results have already been achieved in the Socrates programme where more than one hundred (100) Maltese university students have been selected and are currently taking part in an Erasmus exchange in other universities in the EU. I was delighted to hear only last week that next year the number of beneficiaries will more than double to around two hundred and seventy students (270).

In addition, a number of lecturers have also benefited from mobility exchanges and several others will follow in the months to come.

Malta is also involved in a number of other projects under the Socrates programme, not least a project under the Comenius strand which is involving a local school in Gozo. This particular project will expose school-children to a learning hands-on experience on old and modern fairy tales and legends from Malta and Austria allowing creativity to play its part in the formulation of new stories. By the end of the project, several youngsters from Sir Michelang Refalo Centre for Further Studies in the island of Gozo and others from the Vienna ‘Hadyn Real-Gymnasium' in Austria would not only have visited the sites linked with these tales and legends but would also have used their sense of imagination to create new legends. Their work will be documented in an apposite publication that will be prepared in three different languages, Maltese, English and German.

We are now also looking forward to ensuring that Malta's participation in other programmes will be as successful as the Socrates programme has been. I particularly have in mind participation in the training programme – Leonardo – and the Youth programme.

Malta's participation in the EU training programme, Leonardo, I am pleased to announce, will be officially launched this week. This is a programme that, I know, is already attracting the interest of several local training institutions, but also the interest of industry, trade unions and even local authorities.

The enthusiasm is so great that we have already started participating in a number of mobility projects of the Leonardo programme even before its official launching. Institutions such as our local Fellenberg Training Centre, the Foundation for Human Resources (FHRD), the Eden Foundation and the Emvin Cremona Art & Design Centre are already the beneficiaries of mobility initiatives that have been confirmed and that are taking place between this month and January of next year. Several others will follow and will involve a host of other establishments interested in training, ranging from the Institute of Health Care to the Hairdressing & Beauty Therapy School.

I have said that preparing a country for EU membership is not easy. It is a hard task. I can say this both as a legislator as well as a minister of the current government. Which is why, like other candidate countries, we feel that the European Union and its different institutions should provide the necessary political gestures to demonstrate to candidate countries that the accession process will not be never-ending and to demonstrate that the commitment by these candidates to achieve preparedness will be met with encouragement and support.

To my mind it is also important for the European Union to acknowledge the commitment of the candidate countries by speaking out clearly and in concrete terms on the date of enlargement. So far, too many dates have been mentioned, some plucked out of thin air, but too little has been determined. It goes without saying that for candidate countries, the setting of a fixed date for the first next enlargement is the next priority immediately after the Nice Summit which we hope will bring about the long-awaited agreement on institutional reform.

In this regard, it must be acknowledged that the European Parliament has been probably the most concrete in its approach when it said unequivocally in its recent resolution that new member states must join the Union in time for the next Parliamentary elections that are due in the year 2004.

This clarity has not been reflected to the same degree in last week's Commission Enlargement Strategy Paper which, although generous in proposing a clear target for the conclusion of negotiations, stayed firmly away from proposing a date for enlargement.

Nor has the European Parliament's clarity on the date of enlargement been reflected in the Council or in the different capital cities around the Member States. Here again, we have heard and continue to hear different voices and different views on the date of enlargement, some less optimistic than others. Only last week, for instance, in her first reaction to the Commission's Enlargement Strategy, the Swedish foreign minister said that the Commission was being somewhat cautious. But this Swedish position is not reflected in other Member States.

Here again, therefore, it is time for the Member States to speak with one voice and to agree on a fixed date. This is arguably their most important challenge after the Nice Summit in a few weeks' time. It is my view that this should be done sooner rather than later. Setting the date of enlargement is the most crucial commitment of the EU towards the entire accession process and establishes conclusively that the significant efforts being put by candidate countries to prepare themselves for membership have been duly acknowledged.

It is also of concern for candidate countries that the time period between the conclusion of negotiations and actual accession can be widened because of the ratification process of the accession treaties in each and every EU member country – a process which may certainly take its time. Again, this process must somehow be confined to a time frame which is both reasonable and determined.

Equally worrying is the prospect, still not altogether dismissed, of embarking upon yet another intergovernmental conference before the next enlargement. Again, candidate countries deserve the support of the Union even in this regard, that is, that the process of enlargement should not be stalled by factors or by new conditions that go beyond Nice. In this regard, I cannot but agree with Commissioner Gunter Verheugen who stated recently that another intergovernmental conference should not be a precondition for enlargement.

Finally, it must be recalled that the process of accession is not only a process of pushing laws through Parliament or putting structures in place. More fundamentally, it is a process of the people that involves the people. More so, in a country such as Malta, where the final say in this process will not be in the hands of the politicians but will be in the hands of the electorate. But if this is to be a process for the people, it must also be one that is understandable to the people and one with which they can identify.

To achieve this goal there is still more that we politicians on both sides of the process can and ought to do.