"Agreement reached on EU candidate status"

SOURCE: BETA, TANJUG

BRUSSELS -- French Foreign Minister Allan Juppe has been reported as saying that EU foreign ministers today "reached an agreement to grant Serbia EU candidate status".


Juppe was speaking in Brussels on Monday.

The agreement was reached on Monday, and today there were finally no objections, Juppe told reporters during a break at the meeting of EU foreign ministers, AFP reported.

The formal decision will be adopted on Tuesday and it needs to be confirmed during the EU summit which would be held on March 1 and 2.

"The conditions have been met and that will be encouragement for Belgrade to make progress in the process of EU integration, as well as for Kosovo, which also made progress," Juppe was quoted as saying.

"There must be patience, as some colleagues are saying, because the candidate status does not equal EU membership," the French official stated.

However, Tanjug news agency is quoting its unnamed sources in Brussels, who said that Germany and the Netherlands are still without a stand on Serbia's EU candidate bid.

Other diplomatic sources have confirmed that there was no full agreement among the ministers today on the issue, since some countries, like Holland, are waiting for Germany's clear stances.

Others, like Romania and Lithuania, are still against making Serbia a candidate - the former because of alleged discrimination of the Vlach minority, while the latter wishes to see its foreign minister become the next president of the UN General Assembly - a position for which a Serbian candidate is running as well.