(Adds comments from U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff)
By Huw Jones
STRASBOURG, France, March 11 (Reuters) - Estonia will ignore
protests from the European Commission and sign a bilateral visa
and air security deal with the United States on Wednesday, the
Baltic republic's president said.
Fellow Baltic state Latvia is also due to sign an agreement
on Wednesday, its Foreign Ministry said, adding to a row between
the European Union executive and some new member states keen to
get visa-free treatment in the United States.
Most EU states are part of a U.S. visa waiver programme
which allows people to travel without visas. However, the
programme does not include 11 of the 12 mostly ex-communist
countries that joined the bloc in 2004 and 2007, or older member
Greece.
The European Commission says bilateral deals infringe on its
authority over visa and border policy. It is also concerned that
Washington might use such agreements to press EU member states
to hand over more data on air passengers than it receives under
a U.S-EU deal.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is due to
sign the deals with Estonia and Latvia on Wednesday, a day
before he meets senior EU officials for talks in Slovenia.
Chertoff said the United States would press ahead with
bilateral talks on visa-free deals with newer EU member states.
"We have to admit country by country," Chertoff told Reuters
in an interview in Berlin.
"If we waited until every EU country qualified, it would
delay new entrants for a long time. I think most of the new
entrants would rather get in sooner than later," he said.
FULLY INFORMED
Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said his country had
kept Brussels informed throughout its talks with Washington.
"Estonia, which will sign a memorandum of understanding
tomorrow, has been pursuing this for four years and has kept the
European Commission informed at all times about what we are
doing," Ilves said on Tuesday.
"The Commission only now has decided to say something ... No
one seemed to care during this process," he told reporters
during a visit to the European Parliament.
Latvia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that its aim
was to end inequalities in the treatment of EU citizens
travelling to the United States.
The Commission, which has already tried to press the United
States to grant visa-free access to all 27 EU states, has asked
member governments for a mandate to act as sole negotiator on
the issue.
European Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini
said on Tuesday he hoped talks could move fast enough to allow
for political endorsement of a visa waiver programme for all EU
states at an EU-U.S. summit in June and its implementation by
the end of 2008.
The Czech Republic angered the Commission and some older
member states last month when it signed a deal to make it easier
for Czechs to travel to the United States visa-free in exchange
for enhanced air security cooperation.
Hungary is expected to do the same later this month.
(Additional reporting by Kerstin Gehmlich in Berlin and
Patrick Lannin in Riga; Writing by William Schomberg in
Brussels; Editing by Keith Weir)
