EU Questionnaire: Croatia Answered 4,560, Serbia 2,483 Questions, How Many Will BiH Get

 

The General Affairs Council of the European Union gave the green light on September 20 at a meeting in Brussels for BiH's application for EU membership. The European Commission is expected to start preparing the questionnaire for BiH, writes the Patria News Agency.

What is the questionnaire that our country must fill out before negotiations with the EU can open?

The European Commission's questionnaire for preparing an opinion on the membership application is an analytical instrument of the EU enlargement policy that the European Commission uses to assess the readiness of a country that has submitted a membership application to gain candidate status and open accession negotiations with the EU, a decision ultimately made by the EU Council and the European Council.

The questionnaire contains a detailed list of questions whose structure follows the structure of the EU membership criteria, and the goal is to gain a comprehensive insight into the political, legal, social, economic, and administrative system of the country that has submitted a membership application to the EU through the answers, and to assess its compatibility with the system and values that exist in the EU and EU member states.

The European Commission delivers the questionnaire after the country wishing to join the EU submits a membership application to the EU Council, and after the EU Council invites the European Commission to prepare an opinion on the membership application.

The findings that the European Commission reaches during the analysis of the answers to the questionnaire questions will be contained in the opinion on the membership application, the key content of which is the European Commission's recommendation to the EU Council on granting candidate status to the country that submitted the membership application and opening negotiations, on which the EU Council will base its decision.

The number of questions in the questionnaire varies from country to country, and in the case of Croatia, the questionnaire contained 4,560, Macedonia 4,666, Albania 2,280, Montenegro 2,178, and Serbia 2,483 questions.

When delivering the Questionnaire, the European Commission sets a deadline for submitting answers to the questions, which is usually 2-4 months. For Croatia, this deadline was 3 months, for Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro 4 months, and for Serbia 2 months.

After analyzing the answers, the European Commission may submit additional questions to clarify the submitted answers or to obtain information on new findings. The number of additional questions depends on the content of the answers to the initially submitted questions, the level of detail contained in the answers, the scope of missing information, etc. All the countries listed above received additional questions.

In addition to the answers to the questions, translations into English of valid regulations in various fields must also be submitted, which indicates the importance of the questionnaire and its analytical dimension.