Romania is threatening to create problems for Croatia’s EU accession bid in a diplomatic counter-attack against delays to its own entry into the EU’s border-free Schengen zone.

Romanian foreign minister Teodor Baconschi in an interview with the daily newspaper Adevarul on Monday (3 January) attacked Germany and France for linking Romania’s Schengen bid to progress on corruption and organised crime.

“The same rules that were applied to any other enlargement of the Schengen area must be respected,” he said, noting that Romania had been promised to get into Schengen when it met purely “technical” requirements.

“Let’s have a look at Croatia’s situation. We are supporting any EU enlargement to the western Balkans. But we can’t accept that this is being done without CVM, as long as CVM is being kept in our case,” he added in a thinly-veiled threat to hold Zagreb to ransom over the Schengen issue.

The so-called Co-operation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) was imposed on Romania and its southern neighbour Bulgaria in an unusual move in 2007 because the European Commission and other EU states wanted to pressure the two countries to keep-up anti-corruption reforms after they entered the Union.

Four years later, the CVM is still in place and Romania is still rated as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe.

In a letter sent last month to the European Commission, German and French interior ministers said Romania and Bulgaria must make “irreversible progress” in terms of CVM monitoring before they can enter Schengen.