Thirteen candidate countries will be invited to a "mini-summit" in Copenhagen on October 28th for a briefing on accession terms, diplomats said today.
The meeting will follow an October 24-25th summit in Brussels at which the 15 EU member states are due to name the countries set to complete enlargement talks in December in Copenhagen.
"We are working on arranging a meeting with the candidate countries to brief them about what the European Council [of leaders] agreed to offer the candidates at the Brussels summit," one EU diplomat said.
Diplomats said all 13 candidates, including Turkey, would be invited to the October 28th meeting but that no negotiations would be held.
At EU summits, the candidate countries are normally invited to a lunch or dinner with leaders of the member states, but Denmark felt it right to organise a separate meeting for them this time, the diplomats said.
The EU leaders will make their decision in Brussels based on the annual progress report on the candidates from the European Commission, which is due to be published on October 9th and will spell out the readiness of each applicant.
The 10 frontline candidates are Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Two others, Bulgaria and Romania, hope to join later in the decade. Turkey, the 13th candidate, has yet to start negotiations.