Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-01-Speech-4-051"
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"en.20040401.2.4-051"2
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"Madam President, Turkey is taking great pains over meeting the political criteria and has already taken various reform measures. Mr Erdogan’s government is doing its utmost. That is positive, but a great deal has yet to be done before the negotiations can be opened after December. Torture and the curbing of various civil freedoms remain a problem and the gap between theory and practice remains too wide.
It is not only we, in the ivory towers of Brussels and Strasbourg, who are concerned about this problem; the ordinary citizens in Europe are too, and we must therefore be absolutely certain that we will be taking the right decision when the time comes. I am therefore rather surprised at Mr Lagendijk's comment that he thinks that Turkey should negotiate with one arm tied behind its back if it does not need to meet the political criteria first, and that this can be done parallel to the negotiations about the
. That puts everything back to front, and seems to suggest that we are doing something unsavoury when we ask an accession country to meet our fundamental values first. In that respect too, we should adhere to what has been agreed.
Turkey will soon need to be judged fairly on the basis of the political Copenhagen criteria. I have heard Commissioner Verheugen use the term ‘zero tolerance’, and I find it an appealing one. The Turks deserve this, and so does the population in the European Union. In short, the setting of a date for negotiations in December is not yet a
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