During an EU ministerial session in Brussels on Monday, Austria's Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik asked abut plans for launching the membership talks with Croatia in the light of the fact that EU enlargement is one of the topics on the agenda of an EU summit meeting, scheduled for 16 and 17 June.
The EU ministerial council's chairman, Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, said today that this issue would be discussed at the next meeting of EU foreign ministers, set for 13 June, and that the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) would visit Zagreb on 2-3 June to see whether there was any progress in the implementation of a six-point action plan which the Croatian government recently adopted to solve the case of the runaway general Ante Gotovina.
Del Ponte will then brief the EU ad hoc group, set up to assess Croatia's cooperation with the ICTY, of her visit to Zagreb.
The next EU ministerial summit will be held on 13 June, the same day when del Ponte is expected to submit a report to the UN Security Council on the performance of her office.