Minister-delegate for European Affairs Victor Negrescu stated that Romania is in an advanced stage with preparations for the taking over of the presidency of the European Union Council at the beginning of 2019. "We have currently identified the 1,500 people who will be directly involved in the process of detaining the Presidency and I have personally talked to every president and vice-president of the working groups so as to make sure of their competencies. The training programme with Romanian experts starts on November 1 and subsequently, will follow training programmes with experts of the European Commission and Council and foreign experts for the training of those in charge with the technical elements," Negrescu told a debate on Thursday.
"We hope that this autumn we will have the slogan and also, at the level of Romania's public system, we have all the important issues identified for the future presidency, topics that will obviously be discussed with the countries in the Trio - Finland and Croatia, with those who work at the secretariat general of the EU Council, with representatives of the European Commission and this year's autumn the first debates about possible topics in view of Romania's future presidency [at the EU Council - ed.n.] will be launched,' Negrescu said.
"Romania will hold the presidency at the beginning of 2019, when we practically need to finalise the important cases currently on the agenda of the European institutions. We also have the moment of the UK exiting the European Union, the Brexit will automatically take up a lot of our activity, but also the negotiations regarding the multi-annual financial framework. The talks about the future European budget will be the main topics approached during our presidency. We are talking about the forthcoming cohesion policy, the future agricultural policy, the way we finance both young people in vulnerable situations, and the digital policy at European level," Negrescu further said.
He specified that at Romania's public system level, the inter-governmental working group that deals with preparing Romania's vision for these negotiations regarding the multi-annual financial framework has already been launched. "We hope it will be the Bulgarian presidency [of the EU Council - ed.n.] the one launching a series of common interest topics, be it the future cohesion policy, the Danube strategy, the neighbouring countries, the Western Balkans or even the Republic of Moldova," the minister said.
On a different note, he affirmed that Romania has been observing the technical criteria regarding the accession to Schengen for several years. "Some people, some politicians in Europe are trying to introduce this rhetoric that our borders are not secured. Our borders are totally secured. We invite every one to come to Romania and see how much we have invested in our border's security (...) so, the issue of corruption, for example, is not related to what we do at our borders. Our frontiers are completely secured, our staff knows what they are doing and our technology is an efficient, state-of-the-art one," Negrescu stated. He believes Romania can participate in the Schengen reform by being within this area.
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