On Friday 4 November, the EU expressed its serious concerns about the detention, since the previous evening, of several HDP Members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly. It did, however, defend the agreement it had reached with the country on managing migration flows.
The Turkish authorities arrested several MPs from the HDP – the third biggest party in the Turkish parliament with 59 of the 550 deputies – including its two joint leaders, Selahattin Demirta and Figen Yüksekda. The latter two are accused of supporting terrorist activities. In a joint press release, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini and Commissioner for Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn underlined that the two joint leaders are “both democratically elected leaders and our trusted and valued interlocutors”.
Mogherini and Hahn stated that they expected Turkey to safeguard its parliamentary democracy, including respect for human rights and the rule of law, and added: “We are conveying these expectations directly to the Turkish authorities”. They also said that, together with the Council of Europe, the EU would continue to follow and assess the situation very closely, in constant coordination with all member states.
Speaking on Twitter, Mogherini announced that she was in contact with the Turkish authorities and had requested a meeting with the European Ambassadors be organised in Ankara. German Minister for Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier has also summoned the Turkish chargé d’affaires to a meeting “in light of the most recent developments in Turkey”.
According to Mogherini and Hahn, the arrests of the MPs come on top of the concerns expressed about the removal of immunity for more than 130 democratically elected MPs last May. They said such actions “compromise parliamentary democracy in Turkey and exacerbate the already very tense situation in the South East of the country, for which there can only be a political solution”.
Tension in the south-east of the country also came back to the fore that day after a car bomb attack, claimed by the PKK, near a police station in the city of Diyarbakır. This attack killed at least eight people and left one hundred injured. Mogherini condemned the attack and stated that the EU “is very disquieted by the ongoing violence in the south east over the last 12 months, which cannot continue”. Earlier in the day she and Hahn described as legitimate the action taken against the PKK but insisted that it “should never be allowed to undermine the fundamental principles of democracy”.
The President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, also responded to the arrest of the HDP deputies. He described this action as “an alarming signal on the state of political pluralism in Turkey… the Turkish authorities are not just becoming further removed from the Turkey of democracy but are also turning their back on the values, principles, standards and rules underpinning relations between the EU and Turkey”. He added that he was in constant contact with Mogherini, Hahn and the leaders of the political groups at the European Parliament regarding the most recent developments in Turkey.
The Party of European Socialists (PES) also said that it was “deeply concerned by the detention of the leaders of its associate party, the HDP”. Sergei Stanishev, the leader of the PES stressed: “We are in full solidarity with the HDP and its leaders, who, in addition to opposing the attempted coup d’état, have always supported democracy against attacks from all sides”.
The same sentiments were echoed by the joint leader of the European Greens, Monica Frassoni. She stated: “We would like to express our increasing concern about the bloodshed in Diyarbakir (a major Kurdish city) and the unambiguously authoritarian developments in Turkey, which, far from mitigating tension and facilitating peace, are pitilessly targeting old enemies”. She added that the EU and its member states “would be ill-advised to continue to close its eyes regarding these events in Turkey in the illusion of maintaining” the migration agreement.
In an email message sent, inter alia, to EUROPE, the press adviser to the Turkish Embassy in Brussels, Veysel Filiz, justified the arrest of the MPs, saying that they had not responded to the legal summons and had been detained “at the request of the prosecutors”, and that the detention had been carried out “in total respect of the laws in force”.
The arrests follow significant purges occurred after the attempted coup d’état on 15 July. These purges are continuing, particularly in the media. Although Mogherini published a statement on the subject on the Twitter social network, access to this and other messaging systems, such as WhatsApp and YouTube, was very difficult in Turkey on Friday.
The report on Turkey’s progress towards EU accession is expected to be unveiled by the Commission on Wednesday 9 November.
On Friday, the Commission nonetheless defended the agreement reached between the EU and Turkey on managing the flows of migrants attempting to get into Europe and said that it had every reason to think that this agreement was “holding up well”, according to the terms employed by the Commission spokesperson, Mina Andreeva. She affirmed that six months after its entry into force, this agreement had helped to prevent 720,000 people getting into Greece from Turkey.
She also stated that the Commission was “confident” that the two parties would continue to assume their share of the responsibilities that stem from the agreement, despite the fact that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had again threatened, on Wednesday 2 November, to abandon this agreement if the EU did not grant Turkish citizens visa waivers by the end of year. Andreeva pointed out that there was a range of criteria that the country had to respect. She concluded that “once (the criteria) are met, we will be able to move onto liberalisation. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant, Solenn Paulic and Jan Kordys)