BRUSSELS: Reconciling a Cyprus peace deal with European Union law which guarantees freedom of movement for persons and goods may hold the key to the final phase of settlement negotiations in Switzerland this week.
EU leaders pledged last week to "accommodate" within EU treaties an agreement to reunify the divided east Mediterranean island before Cyprus joins their bloc on May 1.
That is easier said than done, EU officials acknowledge privately. The parties' conflicting demands for undertakings on EU law may yet prove the ultimate stumbling block.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen has travelled to Buergenstock, Switzerland, to assist UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Turkish and Greek leaders in the final three days of talks to seek a peace deal to end the 30-year conflict.
Verheugen's spokesman, Jean-Christophe Filori, said his task would be "to ensure that the settlement respects the principles on which the EU is founded", as spelled out by EU leaders in a statement last Friday.
Annan presented a revised 9,000-page peace plan to all sides on Monday, which sources involved in the talks said contained substantial changes. A deal, which has to be ratified by both communities in April 20 referendums, hinges partly on finding a formula for exempting the Turkish Cypriot area of northern Cyprus from rules that allow EU citizens to settle, buy and own property anywhere in the soon-to-be 25-nation bloc.
Turkish Cypriots fear their poorer part of the island would otherwise be overrun by wealthier Greek Cypriots and would-be Greek settlers and lose its "Turkish character".
PERMANENT DEROGATIONS: Diplomats say Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots are demanding permanent derogations enshrined in "primary law" - i.e. in a treaty - in the belief that only such cast-iron guarantees will withstand a potential European Court of Justice challenge.
There is a precedent. Malta obtained a permanent derogation in its 2002 accession treaty barring foreigners from buying property on the small south Mediterranean island.
But EU officials say there is no chance the Turkish Cypriots will get the same because they are too late and it would take a new treaty. They say the Luxembourg-based court has ample grounds not to overturn any Cyprus peace arrangements.
All 25 present and future EU members have ratified Cyprus' accession treaty, which includes a protocol with an enabling clause allowing the EU to accommodate a peace settlement via a regulation of the Council of Ministers adopted by unanimity.
In EU jargon, that act of implementation would be "secondary legislation". Greece and Cyprus would commit themselves to vote for the regulation. But diplomats say neither is disposed to go further and ratify a new treaty.
"It would take a miracle," an EU official familiar with the issue said. Some EU officials are worried that the powerful Turkish military, which invaded Cyprus in 1974 in response to a brief Greek-backed coup in Nicosia, may have made such permanent derogations a non-negotiable condition for allowing a deal.
Verheugen and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana both tried to talk Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan out of such a rigid stance in Brussels last week, saying it could pose political risks for Turkey's own EU bid, diplomats said.
They argued it was more realistic to seek the kind of transitional arrangements granted to other candidate countries, which they stressed were just as watertight in the EU courts.
There are two alternatives - either fixing a long transition period, such as a 20-year delay before EU law applies fully, or negotiating a flexible transitional arrangement that could be extended under a review clause.
Here too there are precedents. Poland won a 12-year ban on foreigners buying agricultural land after it joins the bloc this year to prevent Germans buying up border areas that were once German territory. But diplomats said the Greek Cypriots and Greece would not accept any arrangement that could be rolled over indefinitely. -Reuters
