MIMICA: 2002 IS YEAR OF SHOWING CREDIBILITY IN IMPLEMENTATION OF SAA

ZAGREB, March 25 (Hina) - Croatian Minister for European Integrations Neven Mimica said at the presentation of new Ministry publications in Zagreb on Monday that the upcoming European Commission report on Croatia's progress in the implementation of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU would turn out positive. Croatia should use this year to prove its credibility for submitting a request for full membership in the EU, he said. #L# "We do not expect any surprises to emerge in the report. It will depict the true situation in the implementation of the SAA fairly well. The general tone will be positive, but the report will also point out some issues where we are not as quick to react," Mimica said. He said this primarily meant the political part of fulfilling tasks bringing Croatia closer to the EU -- the passing of a Constitutional law on minorities, completing processes from the refugee return action plan and regulating media freedom with a new law. Mimica said he expected Croatia's readiness for regional cooperation and cooperation with the Hague-based international war crimes tribunal to be graded positively. The European Commission is expected to complete its report on progress of countries encompassed in the stabilisation and association process by the end of the week, after which the report should enter procedures in EU institutions by mid-April. "Our political and economic goal this year is to prove credibility through an orderly implementation of the SAA, based on which we would submit a request for full membership in the EU at the beginning of next year. In that case, by the end of 2003, we could become official candidate for membership," Mimica said. Asked whether the crisis within the ruling coalition would affect the speed of implementation of the SAA, the minister said it would not slow down the process, because the crisis of the coalition partners had not become a crisis of the government. "I don't expect it to turn up in the EC report as something slowing down the implementation process. However. possible early elections could slow it down, which would lead to a different assessment in Brussels," Mimica said. The Ministry for European Integrations presented its four most recent publications -- the SAA Implementation Plan, a Methodological Handbook for Drawing up an Analysis of Introducing EU Regulations, a Ministry for European Integrations Annual Report for 2001, and an Activity Plan for the period 2002 through 2004. The SAA implementation Plan is an operative government document adopted last October. It lists measures necessary for the successful implementation of assumed obligations and responds to key issues connected to the implementation of the SAA. The Methodological Handbook is intended for experts in state administration, the academic community and private sector, who will be working on analysing the effects of introducing European regulations into Croatia's economy. Legislative adjustment is the most extensive segment of SAA commitments. The Minister's assistant in charge of integration strategy, Visnja Samardzija, said two-thirds of the measures in the SAA Implementation Plan are planned to be implemented this year, and 80 percent of them by the end of 2003. She announced an analysis of guidelines from the EU legislature, with the most negative possible outcome for individual sectors in the Croatian economy, in the sense of costs of adjustment. "Considering the experiences of Poland and Lithuania which we have examined, these areas were the free movement of goods, environment protection, agriculture and transport, so these countries requested transitional periods for these sectors to be completely harmonised with the EU," Samardzija said. (hina) lml