"The last remnant of the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain is falling," Langer added. The expansion of the Schengen area without inner border checks, scheduled for December 21, is the largest in its history.
It involves nine of the ten countries that entered the EU Czech official warns about U.S.-reduced base finance ...
Czech ODS most popular party before Social Democrats - poll ... in 2004, including the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Langer and other diplomats have praised Portugal, which presides the EU in the second half of 2007, for its significant contribution to the Schengen enlargement success. In reaction to then technical problems with the Schengen Information System, a database of wanted, missing and non gratae persons, and on stolen vehicles and documents, Lisbon proposed a solution that enabled all candidate countries to be connected to the system. Langer said the Czechs will start celebrating the check-lifting on the Czech-Slovak border in the night from December 20. "We've symbolically agreed that the last arisen border will fall the first of all," Langer said, alluding to the split of Czechoslovakia in the two successor states in 1993. After Schengen's expansion, the Czech Republic's all neighbours will be Schengen area members, therefore no checks on Czech borders will be necessary any longer. Unlike the Czechs, Slovakia will keep the checks on its border with Ukraine that will be the Schengen area's outer border. After December 21, passport checks will be preserved only at international airports, where they are to be lifted in late March 2008.
(Ceske Noviny)
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