Vlasta Kunová

Each state, which intends to apply for the membership in the European Union shall fulfil several fundamental criteria: it must be a democratic state, its economic policy must function on the basis of a free market and it must accept the content of adopted treaties and the acquis communautaire.

The Slovak republic submitted an Official Application for the Membership in the EU in June 1995 at the summit of the European Council in Cannes. Slovakia has thus become the fourth state of the Central and Eastern Europe applying for the membership.

The paper “From the Association to the Accession of the Slovak Republic into the European Union” deals with the analysis and the evaluation of criteria for the accession of the Slovak Republic into the European Union and with the issues related to the process of negotiations between Slovakia and the EU.

One of the requirements for the accession of the Slovak Republic into the European Union is also the harmonisation of the Slovak law with the law of EC/EU and issues relating to the harmonisation. The Slovak Republic is at present in the final phase of the harmonisation process, which has transformed the Slovak legal order to the extent that a large number of Slovak laws is in compliance with the acquis communautaire. The Slovak legal system has already absorbed 87% of the EC/EU legal regulations, which represents a high degree of efficiency of the approximation of the legislation in Slovakia.

The Slovak Republic has scheduled to conclude all negotiation chapters by the end of 2002. The draft Accession Agreement is being prepared at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Slovak Republic. The Accession agreement is to be signed during the spring of 2003. Slovakia’s accession into the European Union is anticipated in the year 2004. The chapter comprehensively depicts selected issues from the legal point of view. Another ambition of this paper is also to precisely summarize information on the basic instruments of the harmonisation of law and to review chronologically all events preceding the accession of the SR into the European Union.