EU Minister Bozkır: Turkey will not revise definition of terrorism for visa liberalization

Turkey's EU Minister and Chief Negotiator Volkan Bozkır said that Ankara will not make any revisions to legislation and policies regarding terrorism as the country continues its intensive fight against terrorist organizations.

Evaluating the European Commission report submitted to European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, which recommends lifting the visa requirement for citizens of Turkey in the EU's Schengen zone, and the Ankara bureau chiefs of major news outlets late Wednesday, Bozkır said that Ankara will fulfil all the outstanding benchmarks as identified in the progress report by the end of June, but stipulated that they will not revise legislation and policies on terrorism. "It's not possible to make any revision to the legislation and practices on terrorism while our country continues its intense fight against various terrorist organizations and our security officials are being killed every day," he said.

The European Commission report identifies five outstanding benchmarks out of 72 and sets concrete measures that Turkey must meet in order to complete the remaining requirements. The five benchmarks are adopting measures to prevent corruption foreseen by the road map; ensuring an effective follow-up to the recommendations issued by the Council of Europe's Group of States against Corruption (GRECO); aligning the legislation on personal data protection with EU standards, notably to ensure that the data protection authority can act in an independent manner and that the activities of law enforcement agencies fall within the scope of the law; concluding an operational cooperation agreement with Europol; offering effective judicial cooperation in criminal matters to all EU member states and revising the legislation and practices on terrorism in line with European standards through better alignment of the definition of terrorism to narrow the scope of the definition and by introducing a criterion of proportionality.

"The readmission agreement will go in effect in June. The law that will allow judicial cooperation with all EU member states has recently been approved by Parliament and there is no problem with that. The data protection law was required to enhance cooperation with Europol, so it will also be done. We have also made significant progress implementing the recommendations of GRECO. Strengthening the data protection authority can be done," Bozkır said, asserting that Ankara is not far from completing the remaining four requirements.

Nevertheless, he made it clear that Ankara will not take any steps regarding the revision of its legislation and practices on terrorism, which is one of the remaining requirements. "The EU wants us to narrow the scope of the definition [of terrorism]. We already made the necessary changes to the anti-terrorism law in line with EU norms. The concept of immediate and obvious danger that threatens public security was introduced with these changes. However, we don't have the luxury of making these changes while the intensive fight against terrorism is ongoing," he said.

Bozkır then said that the EU's main concern is terrorism but more about situations of unfounded asylum applications from third-country nationals and rejected readmission requests to that third country for its own nationals. "There are about 1.5 million migrants who went to Europe, but nearly no Turkish citizens were among them. There is no single asylum application from a Turkish citizen," he said, calling he concern irrelevant. "We will explain this to our European friends and will convince them," he added.

Bozkır will travel to Strasbourg and Brussels next week to meet with EU leaders as well as representatives from the political parties in European Parliament to explain Ankara's reform process and to voice concerns regarding the visa liberalization process.