Slovakia’s Deputy Prime Minister Josef Kalman

Date: 16/07/1998

said his country should move into the first wave of enlargement candidates at this December's Vienna summit. Speaking at the opening of the country's new EU mission in Brussels, he said: “If Slovakia was objectively assessed, it would get into the first group.” Kalman insisted that Slovakia's legislation on ethnic minorities was already very advanced, although diplomats privately admitted later that it might take a few months before new laws were passed to fulfil all the Union's demands.