EU praises Bulgaria's efforts to join Schengen

(SOFIA) - The European Union on Friday praised Bulgaria's efforts to join Europe's visa-free Schengen zone but said membership was a matter of trust and not just technical criteria.

"I visited the border between Bulgaria and Turkey at Kapitan Andreevo and that gave me a clear idea of the enormous effort that has been put in" to prepare for accession to the Schengen area, EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem told journalists in the Bulgarian capital.

"It is clear that impressive work has been done, hard commitment, and I have been assured about the (government's) ambitions to finalise the final work by the end of March," she said.

"I have also seen profound commitment in this country to fight organised crime and corruption. We congratulate those efforts."

The Schengen zone allows more than 400 million citizens of 25 member countries to move freely without border controls.

Both Bulgaria and Romania, the EU's two most-recent members, have declared Schengen accession a national priority this year, but France and Germany in particular have made their membership conditional on "irreversible progress" in the fight against corruption.

Malmstroem said that while Schengen membership "is based on technical criteria and high-level technical equipment, it is also based on trust because it is our common external border."

It was therefore "very important to continue the reforms as the Bulgarian government is doing to fight organised crime and corruption, to ensure that the institutions and the legal framework and the judiciary are good, solid, efficient, transparent and non-corrupt," Malmstroem said.