The 10 EU candidate countries, including Malta, are urging the European Union to treat them as equal members when they join the Union.

Foreign ministers or their representatives from Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia met for a one-day strategy session in Warsaw on Wednesday.

Malta was represented by the permanent secretary at the foreign affairs ministry, Gaetan Naudi.

Foreign Minister Joe Borg could not attend because he was accompanying Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami in Copenhagen for a meeting with the Danish prime minister.

In a joint declaration issued at the meeting, the ministers confirmed their determination to conclude enlargement negotiations by the end of this year and join the EU in January, 2004. They said they expected the European Council in Seville to confirm this timetable and objective.

The candidate countries agreed on the need for member states and candidate countries to find mutually satisfactory solutions to the challenges that still lie ahead. They emphasised that the outcome of negotiations on agriculture and financial framework should be based on compliance with four major requirements:

¤ All EU policies, including the structural and cohesion policy and the agricultural policy, should be fully extended to new member states;

¤ If any need for transition arrangements or phasing-in periods are justified for financing structural and cohesion policy as well as agriculture, they should not go beyond the present financial perspective;

¤ Equal conditions for farmers from current and new member states are to be ensured in order to guarantee their competitive position;

¤ The net financial position of new member states after accession, including the first year of membership, should improve in comparison with the last pre-accession year.

The candidate countries argued that in order to fulfil these requirements, adequate financial resources should be made available by the EU for enlargement.

Polish foreign minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz stressed that all member states should have "equal conditions that would guarantee their competitive positions".

The ministers acknowledged that the EU had a problem with the financing of enlargement, but they underlined that there should be no differences in funding between old and new members after the current EU budgetary framework runs out in 2006.

Mr Cimoszewicz described the meeting as "very constructive" and said that "no differences in opinion" arose to prevent candidates from issuing their first joint statement on membership.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi emphasised, however, that the statement was not a demand that all new members join under identical conditions.

"Each country will decide on its own" what membership conditions to accept, he said.