STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Sopranos fanatics, this one is for you. Tony Soprano's autographed Suburban is available for purchase on eBayTM. James Gandolfini has personally signed the vehicle. Find this and over 800 other Sopranos items for sale on eBay. http://www.bcentral.com/listbot/ebay ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [But presumably the 25%-30% of "non-citizens" - of both their own countries and of Europe - will be eligible for conscription into the Baltics contingent of NATO's Balkanskorps, where they will be given pride of place when it comes to driving over KLA landmines and getting killed by snipers' bullets.] Baltic Non-Citizens Will not Enjoy Full Rights in EU, Says Verheugen RIGA, Jul 20, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Ethnic Russians who fail to become naturalized citizens in Baltic European Union candidate states Estonia and Latvia will not enjoy full rights after those countries join the bloc, a top EU official said Friday. "They will not enjoy all citizens' rights, but the idea of some basic rights is the same everywhere in Europe," the EU's enlargement commissioner Guenter Verheugen said at the end of a two-day visit to Latvia, where a quarter of the population does not hold citizenship. Non-citizens' rights in an enlarged European Union has grown into a contentious legal question as the EU prepares to admit countries like Latvia, and Verheugen said European Commission legal experts are far from formulating a policy. "It is a very difficult question and so far the answer is very mixed," he said. About one-fourth of Latvia's population of 2.4 million people are non-citizens. Most are ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians who settled in the country when it was part of the former Soviet Union. Member countries have voiced concerns about non-citizens flooding their borders when the EU enlarges to include up to a dozen more countries, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe. A poll conducted in Latvia last year showed about one in five non-citizens between the ages of 16 and 30 have already decided they will leave the country. Meanwhile, the Latvian government has used the benefits of citizens' rights as a tool to step-up naturalization of non-citizens, a move that Verheugen applauded. "The EU is very much in favor of integration as much as possible," he said. Latvia hopes to close accession negotiations by late 2002 and join the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Cyprus and Estonia as a leading candidate for membership, which Verheugen said is likely. "If Latvia continues to prepare in a serious way I don't see any reason why we could not close negotiations by 2002," he said. Latvia has so far closed 16 of the 31 negotiation chapters. ((c) 2001 Agence France Presse __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
