Last Schengen celebrations in Hungary and Slovenia

(HEGYESHALOM) - EU, Hungarian, Austrian and Slovenian dignitaries were taking part in a last round of celebrations Saturday to welcome nine mainly eastern European countries into the border-free Schengen zone.

A day after borders were lifted, making it now possible to travel from Estonia to Portugal without passport controls, one final ceremony was being held at Hegyeshalom, on the Austro-Hungarian border near Slovakia.

Top EU officials were on hand, including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and current EU president Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, accompanied by the prime ministers of Hungary Ferenc Gyurcsany and Slovakia Robert Fico, and Austrian Interior Minister Guenther Platter.

Barroso, Socrates and Platter were then to travel further south Saturday afternoon to attend another ceremony at Skofije, on the border between Italy and Slovenia, alongside Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa and Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato.

Slovenia, the first former Yugoslav state to join the European Union and the eurozone, will now also control 760 kilometres (472 miles) of the Schengen border.

At midnight on Friday, nine new countries -- the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia -- joined the 15 nations already in the border-free no-passport Schengen zone.

European leaders hailed the entry of these mainly ex-communist states into Schengen as border posts were symbolically lifted or sawed through, less than 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

A total 400 million people from 24 countries will now be able to move freely throughout Europe.

The old signatories of the Schengen Agreement, which was signed in 1985 included Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

The latest expansion has taken years of preparation and the European Union estimates that about one billion euros (1.4 billion dollars) has been spent on improving security on the zone's new outer frontiers.

But security services in some of the old Schengen states, notably Germany and Austria, have warned that the lifting of border controls could trigger a crime wave.