The Position of New Central and Eastern European Member Countries of the EU in the Field of Police Cooperation

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the standpoints of Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) in the field of Justice and Home Affaires; especially the field of police cooperation in the context of European Enlargement today.This paper, mainly, focuses on the European Union's assistance policies of Justice and Home Affaires for Candidate countries.These EU assistance policies are divided into two broad categories. One category is policy as the part of pre-accession assistance called PHARE. And the other category is called specific assistance policies including GROTIUS, STOP, OCTOPUS, OISIN, ODYSSEUS, and FALCONE.The purpose of the former policy is to make candidate countries join the EU successfully with the twinning approach (training programs for assistance) . On the other hand, the purpose of the latter policies are implementing the ability of law enforcement of assisted countries in each specific field such as combating human trafficking, Criminal Justice and so on.Before 5th EU enlargement, CEECs as candidate countries, received assistance policies of both categories from the EU and EU member countries.However, on the way to achieving full membership in the EU, CEECs standpoints were changing gradually from their candidate positions.After finishing 5th EU enlargement successfully, EUROPOL (European Police office: Main institution for police cooperation at the European level) has launched “EUROPOL Enlargement Project” for coordinating the accession process of CEECs on behalf of EUROPOL successfully.In this context, the standpoint of CEECs is a likely candidate country assisted by EU and former member states of EU. But at the same time, CEECs start to assist new candidate countries of the EU (Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey) with their political and administrative experience and successful accession process to the EU through By-and Multi- lateral cooperation with these candidate countries.For instance, in 2002, the Hungarian Government offered to assist the Croatian government reform the government institutions of Croatia for joining the EU. It is specifically mentioned that this offer is earlier than the European Commission's proposal for applying the experience of new member states.These two aspects show that CEECs have been partially assisted countries, at least in the field of EUROPOL cooperation, but at the same time, have tried to make the best use of their experience of accession as the assistance tool for new candidate countries.In other words from the context of European integration (Deepening and Enlargement of the EU), CEECs have kept a nearly assisted position in the deepening phase while trying to achieve an assisting position in the phase of enlargement.The result of the examination is that CEECs are now on their way to changing their standpoint from assisted countries to mediation countries between the EU and new candidate countries in the field of police cooperation.