Cătălin Predoiu:
During the last two weeks, I held a program of meetings with the Bulgarian Minister of the Interior in Sofia, together with the European Commissioner, with the German Minister in Bucharest and with the Hungarian Minister in Budapest. In all of them, we obtained unconditional support for Romania’s accession to Schengen with the land border, in 2024.
Today, I attended the interior ministers’ meeting in Ghent, Belgium, organized by the European Commission and devoted to the issue of immigration. Migration is one of the most acute current vulnerabilities of the European Union. If we do not take urgent action in all member states, migratory flows will destabilize the European Union in the next ten years. If the European Union does not quickly develop and adopt in the new European Commission and in the new European Parliament a coherent migration policy, the phenomenon will get out of control. Incidentally, the topic of migration is one that deserves more attention in the electoral campaign for the European Parliament.
During the European meeting in Ghent, I had a wide presentation, accompanied by slides, graphs and concrete statistics, as well as a series of video presentations of case studies solved by the Romanian Border Police, as well as other interventions on during the course of the conference.
In my intervention, I once again demonstrated the results of the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs in protecting national and European Union borders, as well as in combating illegal migration.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs’ plan to combat illegal migration has yielded results. Romania has no problems with illegal migration. The Romanian border is currently secured against illegal migration.
Through this intervention in Ghent, as well as through the bilateral discussions we had here with the European Commissioner, with the Ministers of the Interior, including Minister Karner, we continued the positioning and profiling of Romania as an important state of the European Union, as a Schengen member state with performance in border management, a model for other EU member states.
Today, no one can dispute the fact that Romania has no structural problems of illegal migration. No one can dispute the fact that the Ministry of Internal Affairs protects the national and Union borders very well.
On these pillars we build our continued action to enter Schengen and with the land border in 2024. As I said before, we have a well-established diplomatic plan that we will follow until we reach our goal.
