Türkiye is “not in a position” to approve Sweden’s NATO bid, as the latter has failed to take action regarding Ankara’s concerns about terrorist groups, the presidential spokesperson said Saturday.
“We are not in a position to send a (ratification) law to the parliament,” Presidential Spokesperson Ibrahim Kalın told reporters.
Kalın said they could not send the legislation on Sweden’s NATO bid because some lawmakers may choose not to ratify it.
“We have a serious problem about this,” he said.
Kalın also said it would take at least until June for Sweden’s parliament to vote through the measures and that Ankara would wait for all the Swedish legislation to pass before it acts.
“It will take (Sweden) about six months to write and pass the new laws,” he said. “They will need a bit more time.”
In November, the Swedish parliament passed a new anti-terror law expected to come into force in the spring of next year and enable “wider criminalization of participation in a terrorist organization or a ban against terrorist organizations.”
The sides inked a tripartite agreement on June 28 at a NATO summit in Madrid, where Stockholm and Helsinki vowed to address Türkiye’s security concerns and fulfill critical demands such as stricter anti-terror laws and the extradition of terrorist suspects.
On Sunday, the Swedish premier said that Stockholm could not fulfill all of Ankara’s conditions for approving its application to join NATO. “Türkiye has confirmed that we have done what we said we would do, but they also say they want concessions that we can’t make, those we don’t want to make,” he had claimed.
However, Kristersson said that he respected Ankara’s right to make its own decision on ratification.
Alarmed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the two Nordic nations threw away their longstanding policies of military nonalignment. They applied to join NATO in May, but the process has been held up by the Turkish government’s objections to their accession on the grounds of security concerns.
To garner Ankara’s hard-earned approval, Stockholm extradited three people, including a PKK terrorist member, to Türkiye in early December. Ankara welcomed the development but said it “wasn’t enough” for a greenlight. As of the new year, Sweden has also taken into effect a constitutional amendment that enables “greater possibilities to make use of legal means to limit freedom of association for groups that engage in or support terrorism.”
However, Sweden’s top court last month refused to extradite a prominent FETÖ suspect, Bülent Keneş, in a move that was displeasing for Ankara, with Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu declaring the country “not even halfway through fulfilling the commitments” it made to secure their support.
