Danish Foreign Minister Rasmussen: EU should not lower the criteria for Ukraine’s accession.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen told the British newspaper Financial Times that the European Union should not “lower the bar” of its criteria for accepting Ukraine.
The minister said the EU risks “importing instability” if it relaxes its standards on democracy and corruption in order to speed up the admission of Ukraine and other countries into its ranks. He said the Danish government supports Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and the Western Balkan countries joining the bloc, but stressed that “geopolitical circumstances” did not justify postponing governance reforms.
“If you don’t complete the reform process before accession, there could be a risk of a slowdown later. And we don’t export stability, we risk importing instability. And that is why it is so important to stress the need to meet the criteria (for EU membership),” the newspaper quoted the minister as saying.
He said that if any “special approach” should be applied to Ukraine, it should be in the form of additional assistance with the full involvement of the EU member governments to help Kiev meet the standards. According to Rasmussen, the process has been too bureaucratic in the past. “We want to invest, we want to help, we want to be positive and help some as much as we can, but we cannot lower the bar,” the minister stressed.
He would not name a timetable for Ukraine or other countries to join, but added that “everyone understood that for geopolitical reasons” the bloc should “intensify as much as possible”. According to the newspaper, Rasmussen also said that Denmark, which blocked Albania and Northern Macedonia from joining the EU in 2019, had changed its position and was even open to internal reform of the bloc, including the way of voting, to admit new members.
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