11 May 2016•Update: 11 May 2016
STRASBOURG, France
Turkey's EU minister has told reporters that it remains “impossible” for the country to accept changes to its anti-terror legislation amid ongoing violence from the PKK.
Volkan Bozkir was speaking alongside European Parliament President Martin Schulz in Strasbourg. Bozkir said: “In Turkey, where we have more than 450 security officers killed by PKK terrorism and [where] more than five or six suicide-bomber attacks have taken place (…) Changing the anti-terror law is completely impossible.”
Earlier, Bozkir had said he "would try" to explain the situation in Turkey to the EU officials he met during the day.
Bozkir later said that Turkey regarded its legislation as already being “relevant to European standards. We have made many changes in that law”.
Last week, the European Commission proposed visa-free Schengen zone travel for Turks as part of a deal which would see Turkey stem the refugee flow to Europe in exchange for speeding up the candidate country’s EU membership.
However, among five remaining benchmarks for Turkey to address in order to receive visa-free travel, the EU has called for a change in Ankara's legislation on terrorism – a demand that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has criticized and rejected.
Bozkir added: “All the agreements we have achieved until now, built on confidence, goodwill, taking responsibilities and also taking political risks, are facing a very dangerous moment so my visit here is to look at the same picture, which contains a lot of difficulties, but also to try to find if there are any ways out.”
The Turkish minister added that the country “has worked very hard on the fulfillment of the [EU] expectations” and said Ankara’s interpretation was that Turkey had moved sufficiently on its part.
Schulz told reporters that “requirements we thought that Turkish side should have to fulfill from our point of view [are] not yet complete”. He added that the visa-free process could not start “for the time being”.
