ANKARA
Turkey's EU Minister and Chief Negotiator Egemen Bagis has said Turkey's steps and reforms were not reflected onto the official negotiation process with EU as they should be due to the blockades.
Assessing his four years in the office to AA, Bagis said the recent Turkey Progress Report was the most clear evidence of that subjectiveness.
He said despite every problem and pessimism coming from the EU, Turkey clung to the process - which he defined as the most important modernization project of Turkey- in the last four years. He said he got sad to see all those efforts were being interpreted by a very narrow point of view.
Bagis said Turkey had been facing unfair political blockades any countries had ever faced.
Bagis added they prepared Turkey's own progress report with the order of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
He said 3 chapters had been opened to negotiations in the last four years, increasing the number of opened chapters to 13 out of 33, adding that remaining 20 had not been opened due to several countries' political blockage and the decisions taken in reference to the Supplementary Protocol in 2006.
Bagis also expressed that five chapters were blocked by France and six others by the Greek Cypriot administration without any justification.
Bagis said that Turkey had made great progress relating to visa exemption with the government's resolute stand.
"While EU was not able to mention 'freedom of visa' two years ago, getting to preparation point for an outlined road map for visa exemption is very pleasing," he said.
Bagis also said that they would carry on working hard to ease Schengen visa for Turkish citizens.
Touching on increasing standards of living in Turkey, Bagis said that they approximately 600 legislations and subsidiary regulations had been made in the last four years.
Bagis also stated that he had paid 152 official visits abroad, 124 of them in EU countries, adding that he had visited 33 times only Brussels in his term of office.
