The EU's human rights policy towards turkey: how IT has impacted the accession negotiations

The European Union's reports on Turkey often conclude with the statement that ‘no substantial progress’ has been made in the areas of human rights and democracy promotion. Although the European Council Summit at Helsinki in 1999 promoted Turkey to the status of a candidate country, it noted that there were ‘still serious shortcomings’ in terms of human rights in the country. This paper looks at the evolution of the EU's human rights policy towards Turkey and compares it with the policy stance towards other countries such as the eastern European countries with regard to similar issues. The argument made is that there are inconsistencies in the Union's policy towards Turkey, which can be explained as the former's agenda of containment, deliberately delaying the latter's accession, but not rejecting membership outright because of the latter's geostrategic and political significance to the Union. At the same time, Turkey's desire and commitment to become a member of the EU has made it vulnerable to the latter's influence in its domestic politics, especially in the context of democratization and promotion of human rights.