Impact of the Expansion of Schengen Acquis on the National Policies and Local Communities of Nine Central and East European Countries

The project started at the end of year 2001 and was developed through the co-operation of following centers from 9 countries:

European Institute, Bulgaria
Europeum, Czech Republic
Praxis Centre for Policy Studies, Estonia
Latvian Centre for Human Rights and Ethnic Studies, Latvia
Institute for Public Policy, Republic of Moldova
Institute of Public Affairs, Poland
Romanian Economics Policy, Romania
Institute for Economic and Social Reform, Slovakia
International Centre for Policy Studies, Ukraine

The project aimed to systematise the perception of the government and the public opinion of the enlargement and implementation of Schengen rules in participating in this project states, in view to develop recommendations for policy promotion in respective field by candidate and EU member States.

As a result of studies developed:
Chapter 1. Schengen - Consequences for National Migration Policy
Chapter 2. The Western border of the Republic of Moldova - the future Schengen border
Chapter 3. EU enlarged, Schengen implemented - what next?

- Political perspectives,regional recommendations were formulated:a) to the institutions of the European Union:
- to introduce regular passport controls on all the borders where haphazard controls prevail (e.g. the Czech-Slovak or Ukrainian-Russian borders);
- to offer assistance in staffing on the future external border of the Union, taking in acount that in some countries these borders will become internal;
- to support the cross-border community development by reintegrating the small-scale shuttle traders into legitimate economic activities by setting up know-how and start-up investment funds with the assistance of local governments and chambers of commerce.

b) to the international specialized agencies (e.g. UNHCR, IOM): - to point to the insufficient de facto protection and integration of genuine refugees and to the states' inability to protect victims of trafficking (especially minors and kidnapped women);

c) to the non-governmental coalitions and think tanks (e.g. OSI, ECRE):
- to propagate the university and think-tank research on successful cases of cross-border cooperation and to promote the positive aspects of Schengen acquis expansion;
d) to groups of governments (e.g. ICMPD, CEI):
- to set short-term visa costs at equal low cost to distribute the processing workload more evenly, and to avoid clogging up of certain transit routes;
- to set up common consular offices of the candidate countries in smaller centers (e.g. in Belarus, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Russia, Central Asia) of the countries whose citizens require visas now) by introducing the channels of communication;
- to share the information between the countries of origin of ilegal migration.