Another Big Step Towards the Turkey-EU Divorce

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution on Tuesday that reintroduces a monitoring process for Turkey’s human rights progress for the first time since 2004. The resolution, which focuses on the purges and emergency legislation following the July 2016 coup attempt, calls on Turkey to:

38.1. lift the state of emergency as soon as possible;

38.2. in the meantime, halt the publication of emergency decree laws which bypass parliamentary procedures, unless strictly needed under the state of emergency law, and put an end to the collective dismissal of civil servants through emergency decree laws;

38.3. release all the detained parliamentarians and co-mayors pending trial;

38.4. release all the imprisoned journalists pending trial;

38.5. establish and launch the work of the Inquiry Commission on State of Emergency Measures to ensure an effective national judicial remedy for those dismissed through emergency decree laws;

38.6. ensure fair trials with respect for due procedural guarantees; [….]

Although PACE is not a body of the EU, the resolution makes Turkey’s failure to meet the Copenhagen criteria for EU accession quite clear. In what has now become a cliché of Turkish political discourse, an adviser to Erdogan has responded to the resolution by turning it back on against Europe saying: “This is a political operation. It is the EU countries that need monitoring.”

However formulaic the back and forth between Europe and Turkey may be, the resolution comes at a critical juncture for Turkey’s relationship with the West more generally. While President Trump called Erdogan to congratulate him on his referendum win, for Europe the referendum looks like it may be an end to the EU accession charade. The EU’s Ankara negotiator has called for an end to the long-standing talks, as have a host of European politicians. Erdogan, for his part, is still maintaining play-acting for now. In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday he claimed “There is not a single thing that we are not ready to do, the minute [the EU asks] for it. Whatever they wish, we do.”

While the Turkish rejection of the PACE resolution makes that claim plainly untrue, Turkey arguably has greater leverage over the EU than the EU has over Turkey. For the Turks, an end to accession would be an end to talks that they’ve known have been doomed for the better part of a decade and that had been at a nadir even before the referendum. For Europe, a breakdown with Turkey could mean the end of the EU-Turkey migrant deal and potentially a full-scale resumption of the refugee crisis. Turkey has already named visa-free travel as their price for maintaining the deal, but it seems likely that this is only the first round of the divorce proceedings between Turkey and Europe.