Slovaks want to be covered by Lisbon opt-out

(BRATISLAVA) - Slovakia will not back an opt-out from the EU's reforming Lisbon Treaty, demanded by Czech President Vaclav Klaus, unless it covers Slovaks too, Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak said on Sunday.

"Anything that would be agreed for the Czech Republic must be approved by everyone, including us. And we wouldn't vote for something that would get us into an unfavourable or inferior situation," Lajcak told private TV Markiza.

The staunchly eurosceptic Klaus, the last EU leader holding out on signing the treaty designed to streamline governance in the 27-nation bloc, asked for an opt-out on the treaty earlier this month.

He wants to make sure that ethnic Germans forced out of former Czechoslovakia after World War II on the basis of presidential decrees cannot claim their property back.

But the postwar decrees also affected more than 30,000 ethnic Hungarians, who were expelled from the territory of today's Slovakia after the war.

Czechoslovakia split amicably into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico also said on the public Czech Television on Sunday that the decrees "are part of the Slovak legal order and can't be abolished or changed".

The Czech government said it wanted the EU leaders meeting on October 29-30 to discuss the opt-out on the treaty which must be ratified by all 27 EU member states to take effect.