POLITICAL CRITERIA FOR ACCESSION TO THE EU: HUMAN RIGHTS CONDITIONALITY AND THE CROATIAN CASE

In 1993, the European Union (EU) member states established the Copenhagen Criteria, which define political, economic and legal (adoption of acquis) conditions for accession to the Union. The Central and Eastern European (CEE) Countries were the first candidates whose applications were considered with respect to their compliance with these criteria. In this article the political criteria, specifically the human rights conditionality which is scrutinized under the political pillar, is analyzed. Since 2004, the year that the CEE countries joined the EU, an emphasis on a ‘stricter’ political conditionality has been made by the European officials and institutions. The objective of this article is to discover how the changes in the EU’s approach to political conditionality after 2004 have had an impact upon the human rights conditionality. For this purpose, the Croatian case and the way the EU applied conditionality to this country is examined, and it is concluded that despite some indicators of change, the stricter political conditionality does not have strong reflections on the human rights conditionality in the Croatian accession process.