TURKEY PRESSED TO ‘UPDATE’ CONSTITUTION
By Rikard Jozwiak

European Voice
Sept 16 2008
Belgium

EU suggests it will soon expand accession talks with Turkey, but
urges it to revise its constitution.

The EU has called on Turkey to "update" its constitution in the wake
of Turkey’s constitutional court’s decision to reject an attempt to
ban the country’s ruling party.

Speaking late on 15 September, after a biannual meeting with Turkey’s
foreign minister, Olli Rehn, the European enlargement commissioner,
said that Turkey’s political elite should seize on the rare moment of
political stability "to update its constitution to reflect the country
and society it has become and to consolidate rights and freedoms for
its citizens".

The court ruled, very narrowly, in late July that the governing
Justice and Development (AK) party had not breached its constitutional
obligation to maintain Turkey’s secular order, a ruling that has
eased some of Turkey’s political tensions.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Ali Babacan, did not comment on Rehn’s
call, but emphasised that Turkey has already made numerous legal
changes in order to comply with EU rules and, in particular, changes
to the notorious Article 301 of its penal code. The article, which
made it a crime to "insult Turkishness", had been invoked in numerous
cases brought against public intellectuals who raised questions about
the culpability of Turks in what Armenians and a growing number of
countries describe as the genocide of ethnic Armenians in the latter
years of the Ottoman Empire. The article has not been repealed, but has
been modified to replace "Turkishness" with "the Turkish nation" and
it can now only be invoked with the permission of the justice minister.

Accession talks The biannual meeting of foreign ministers from Turkey
and from the current and next occupants of the EU’s presidency – on
this occasion, France and the Czech Republic – produced no concrete
results, but France’s European affairs minister, Jean-Pierre Jouyet,
said that the EU expected to expand accession talks with Turkey during
its presidency.

Turkey has so far opened 10 chapters of the EU’s acquis communitaire,
the body of legislation that must be transposed into national
legislation before enlargement. It has, though, provisionally closed
only one. Talks on two another have been frozen since December 2006
because of Turkey’s refusal to open its ports to Cypriot ship. For the
same reason, the EU has also refused to discuss opening another six,
principally on trade issues and foreign affairs.

Jouyet said did not say how many chapter the EU expects to open this
year, but Rehn hinted that two chapters might be opened: Chapter Four,
on the free movement of capital, and Chapter Ten, on information
society and media.

Sources in Brussels also suggest that Chapter 15, on energy, might
be opened before the Czech Republic takes over the presidency of the
EU, in January 2009. In part due to the recent crisis in Georgia,
energy has become a key area for the EU, as it is keen to diversify
its energy sources and reduce its dependence on Russia.

Babacan also mentioned that Turkey was ready to open negotiations
on two other chapters, one on economic and monetary policy and the
other on culture and education.

Both could be politically sensitive for the EU, as completion of the
economic chapter would bring forward the notion of Turkey adopting the
euro, while the chapter on education could raise difficult questions
about the massacres of Armenians in 1915.

France, which is one of the countries that describes the killings as
genocide, is one of the strongest opponents of Turkish membership of
the EU. However, Jouyet, who chaired the meeting in the absence of
the Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, insisted that Paris would lead
negotiations impartially during its occupancy of the EU presidency.