Human Rights Issues at the Negotiations on EU Accession – the Croatian Experience

Abstract

As the first country of the so-called Western Balkans region and the second country from ex-Yugoslavia (after Slovenia), Croatia joined the European Union (EU) in 2013, remaining the last country to be accepted into the Union’s membership. In this article, we shed light on Croatia’s path to joining the EU, which was marked by important novelties concerning previous negotiations and accessions in the form of demands placed on Croatia by the Union. Introduction of the new Chapter 23 ‘Judiciary and Fundamental Rights’ was the most important novelty, which also turned out to be the last major hurdle in Croatia’s path towards the EU. Thus, negotiations on Chapter 23 and its content are the central interest of this article. Furthermore, the emergence of this new approach to enlargement and negotiating framework practically coincided with the formation of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), an institution created with the aim of strengthening EU’s arsenal in the field of human rights. Croatia started to participate in the work of the FRA only in 2010/2011, that is during the final stage of accession when negotiations were almost closed. Taking the latter into consideration, we refer to the role of the first EU human rights agency in the Croatian negotiating process.