EU: Deterioration of fundamental rights continued in Turkey

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The European Commission has issued its 2021 Report on Turkey.

The report has shared the following evaluation about the country:

"Over the reporting period, the Turkish government did not reverse the negative trend as regards the reform agenda despite the Turkish government's repeated commitment to the objective of EU accession. The EU's serious concerns on the continued deterioration of democracy, the rule of law, fundamental rights and the independence of the judiciary have not been addressed. There was further backsliding in many areas."

Noting that "there are serious deficiencies in the functioning of Turkey's democratic institutions," the European Commission has raised concerns that "democratic backsliding continued during the reporting period."

The report has recalled that in June 2019, the General Affairs Council reiterated the Council's position of June 2018 that Turkey has been moving further away from the European Union (EU).

"Turkey's accession negotiations have therefore effectively come to a standstill and no further chapters can be considered for opening or closing," the report has explained, briefly adding: 

"The EU Leaders confirmed that dialogue on rule of law and fundamental rights remains an integral part of the EU-Turkey relationship."

Until 2016, the European Commission had been issuing its reports on Turkey, Serbia, North Macedonia, the EU candidate countries, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo as "progress reports."

The country reports make a detailed evaluation of the political, social and economic developments that unfolded in the countries and their performance in 35 negotiation chapters from June 2020 to June 2021.

Turkey has slammed the report

The Foreign Ministry of Turkey has slammed the report of the European Commission on Turkey's membership process, saying, "It once again reflected the double standard approach towards the country."

The Ministry has said in a statement that "the report on the enlargement strategy unfortunately overlooked responsibilities towards Turkey at a time when the Ankara government revived high-level dialogue with the EU and sought to develop a better political agenda with the bloc."

According to the statement, Turkey "rejected the inclusion of inconsistent and biased Greek and Greek Cypriot theses in the report, as it did in the previous years," the state-run Anadolu Agency (AA) has reported.

"Turkey does not accept baseless and unfair criticism, especially in the chapters on political criteria along with judiciary and basic rights," it has said, adding "the EU came up with unproportionate findings without evaluating the conditions specific to Turkey with regards to the country's governance, political system, basic rights and fight against terrorism."

"While it praised Turkey for its efforts in the context of migration, it did not mention the EU obligations in this regard, and it was unacceptable that the EU only sought to cooperate with Turkey based on its sole interests in certain fields," the statement has added further.

"The EU is not authorized in the issues of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean and Cyprus," the Foreign Ministry has stated, adding that the European Commission report "included either inconsistent or pro-Greek or Greek Cypriot theses, which were rejected by Turkey."

The Ministry has said it "welcomed that the report highlighted the development of the economy and it was moving toward a pre-crisis level thanks to the measures adopted as part of efforts to contain the COVID-19 outbreak but the EU did not have the right to remind Turkey of its obligations while politicizing the update of the Customs Union, especially at a time when state interference in the economy has risen to eliminate the negative impact of COVID-19 on finance."

Details from the European Commission report

Some highlights from the 128-page report of the European Commission on Turkey have been as follows:

Human rights

• The deterioration of human and fundamental rights continued. Many of the measures brought in during the state of emergency remain in force.
• The legal framework includes general guarantees of respect for human and fundamental rights but the legislation and practice still need to be brought into line with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case-law.
• Broad-scale restrictions imposed on the activities of journalists, writers, lawyers, academics, human rights defenders and critical voices continued to have a negative effect on the exercise of their freedoms and have led to self-censorship.
• Turkey's refusal to implement ECtHR rulings, notably in the cases of Selahattin Demirtaş and Osman Kavala, further increased concerns regarding the judiciary's adherence to international and European standards.

Women and LGBTI+s

• Turkey's withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention also put into question its commitment to such standards. The new human rights action plan, which promised reforms in a number of areas, does not address critical issues.
• The pressure faced by female politicians and women's organisations activists characterised by frequent detention, investigation, and arrest created a serious hurdle for the exercise of freedom of association, freedom of expression, and for participation in political life. Discriminatory discourse and hate speech targeting LGBTIQ community increased.

Press freedom

• Arrests, detentions, prosecutions, convictions and dismissals of media staff leading to censorship and self-censorship among media professionals further increased, including for their reporting activities on COVID-19.
• Overall, an estimated 60 journalists were in prison. In 2020, at least 48 journalists were taken into custody, 23 journalists were sentenced to a total of 103 years in prison.
• As of January 2021, at least 353 journalists have been prosecuted in the last two and a half years. In 2020, trials were launched against at least 53 journalists. Threats and physical attacks on journalists and media organisations due to their work continued during the reporting period.
• Civil society organisations reported that in the first weeks of 2021, five opposition journalists from around Turkey were physically assaulted. In total, at least 18 journalists were attacked in 2020; attacks continued in 2021.

Kurdish question

• There were no developments on the resumption of a credible political process to achieve a peaceful and sustainable solution. Human rights organisations and opposition parties reported serious violations of human rights by security forces.
• Around 4,000 members and officials of the People's Democratic Party (HDP) remain in prison, including a number of parliamentarians.
• In June, the Constitutional Court accepted an indictment demanding the closure of the HDP, seeking a political ban for 451 HDP executives, including the party's co-chairs and all past and present members of Parliament and executives as well as a freeze on the party's bank accounts. There were pending requests by the prosecution in the Parliament to lift the immunity of almost all HDP lawmakers.

Presidential system and pressure on opposition

• The presidential system has largely weakened the Parliament's legislative and oversight functions.
• The presidential system has weakened the Parliament's legislative function, in particular due to the extensive use of Presidential decrees and decisions.
• During the reporting period, the Parliament adopted 61 pieces of legislation out of the 821 proposed bills. 77 presidential decrees were issued on a wide range of policy areas including in the socio-economic policy areas, which do not fall within the remit of presidential decrees.
• The President possessed vast legislative powers and continued to curtail the legislative role of the Parliament through presidential decrees and decisions regulating key policy areas. Policy deliberations forging cross-party consensus rarely occurred. The Parliament continued to lack the necessary means to hold the government accountable.
• The use of traditional instruments of oversight of the executive by Parliament, such as a vote of confidence and the possibility of oral questions to the executive, is still not possible; only written questions can be addressed to the Vice-President and ministers.
• The politicisation of the administration, judiciary and the security sector further increased. Most of the key institutions are directly attached to the Presidency. The civil service has been politicised, especially in the senior managerial levels.
• The legal framework enabled undue political influence over regulatory authorities. Most regulatory authorities remain directly linked to the Presidency and the President has the power to nominate the heads of the vast majority of the public regulatory authorities. During the reporting period, the President twice dismissed the governor of the Central Bank.
• The pressure of the government over opposition mayors further intensified. Mayors of the opposition parties faced politically motivated administrative and judicial investigations.

Fight against corruption

• Corruption remained widespread and continued to be an issue of concern. There was no progress in addressing the many gaps in the Turkish anti-corruption framework, which is a sign of a lack of will to fight decisively against corruption.

Foreign policy

• Turkey has some level of preparation in the area of foreign, security and defence policy. There was backsliding in the framework of political dialogue on Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) as Turkey's increasingly assertive foreign policy continued to collide with the EU priorities under CFSP, notably due to its support for military actions in the Caucasus, Syria and Iraq.
• While the institutional framework enabling Turkey's participation in CFSP and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) is in place, Turkey maintained a very low alignment rate of around 14 percent.
• Turkey's military support in Libya, including the deployment of foreign fighters on the ground, and its persistent criticism of, and lack of cooperation with Operation IRINI, are detrimental to the EU's effective contribution to the UN arms embargo implementation, and have led to conflicting approaches on Libya. Turkey wants to see a stable and prosperous Syria, an objective it shares with the EU. The recommendations from last year were addressed only to a very limited extent.

Policy on migration and refugees

• Turkey continued to make significant efforts to host and meet the needs of the largest refugee community in the world. The full operational budget of EUR 6 billion under the Facility for Refugees was contracted by the end of 2020 and over EUR 4.2 billion was disbursed by August 2021.

Climate crisis

• It made some progress, including the ratification of the Paris Agreement on climate change and increasing capacity in waste management, wastewater treatment and on legislative alignment, but enforcement and implementation remain weak.
• Turkey needs to follow up with an enhanced nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement, long-term strategic decarbonisation and adaptation plans and appropriate legislation reflecting them domestically.

(KÖ/SD)

Click here for the key findings of the report