Europese Commissie confronteert Turkije met schending persvrijheid (en)
The European Commission in its annual enlargement report will tell Turkey to stop attacking investigative journalists and to back off on Cyprus gas exploration.
The draft report, due to be published on Wednesday (12 October) and seen by EUobserver, singles out Turkey in a general complaint about attempts to gag independent reporting in the Western Balkans, saying: "In Turkey, the legal framework does not yet sufficiently safeguard freedom of expression. A very high number of cases are brought against journalists and the number of journalists in detention is a concern."
In the chapter dealing with Turkey, it notes: "While substantial progress has been made over the past 10 years, significant efforts are required to guarantee fundamental rights in practice, in particular freedom of expression."
With Ankara recently sending gunboats to accompany a Turkish ship drilling for gas in waters claimed by EU member state Cyprus, it "also urges the avoidance of any kind of threat, source of friction or action that could damage good neighbourly relations."
Turkish reporters writing about sensitive issues, such as state links to underground Islamist movements, Kurdish minority rights and the 1915 Armenian genocide routinely face prosecution and jail sentences under anti-terrorism laws in actions that undermine the country's image as a model Islamic democracy.
Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based NGO, in a survey earlier this year noted that 60 journalists remain in prison while 62 were tried in media freedom cases in the first three months of this year alone.
Reporters Ahmet Sik and Nedim Seder have so far spent six months in prison for looking into the Energekon case, the government's prosecution of people allegedly linked to a secret ultra-nationalist group run by military officers.
Authorities have also seized all known copies of Sik's book on the subject, The Army of the Imam, and made it a criminal offence to keep electronic copies of the manuscript on a computer hard drive. Reporters Vedat Yildiz and Lokman Dayan in March received eight-year suspended sentences for covering a pro-Kurdish demonstration in southeast Turkey. Meanwhile, the decision in September is to wrap up the investigation into the 2007 murder of pro-Armenian writer Hrant Dink is widely seen by NGOs as an attempt to portray his young killer, Ogun Samast, as a 'lone wolf' extremist while making sure that suspected links to government officials are never explored.
On Western Balkans enlargement, the draft European Commission report does not say whether Brussels will recommend that Serbia receive formal EU candidate status.
The decision is to be taken by the college of commissioners at the last minute before it is published on Wednesday amid attemtps to get Serbia to play ball on normalising day-to-day relations with Kosovo.
EUobserver has learned the commission will on Wednesday recommend awarding the status as a reward for Serbia handing over top war crimes fugitives Ratko Mladic and Goran Hdazic to the Hague earlier this year. But the award will be made on the understanding that Germany will in December block an EU decision to start accession talks with Serbia due to its support for ethnic Serb organised paramiltary groups and gangsters in north Kosovo.
Looking at the other Balkan EU aspirants, the report confirms that Croatia "should" be able to join the EU on 1 July 2013 and holds up Zagreb as a "an incentive and catalyst [for pro-EU reforms] for the rest of the region." But it adds that EU officials will send special missions to monitor its fight against high-level corruption and publish six-monthly reports in the run-up to enlargement in a process that could see Brussels recommend that EU countries put the process on hold.
Montenegro and Macedonia come top of the class in terms of progress on reforms. But the commission does not say anything about when the two EU candidates can start accession talks. Albania is said to have made "limited progress" amid an ongoing political deadlock over last year's elections. But Bosnia is described as being in a state of "paralysis and confrontation" between ethnic Serbs and Muslims with "lack of a common understanding on the overall direction and future of the country."
The two special cases in the report - Iceland and Kosovo - stand poles apart.
The commission notes that Iceland is more or less already an EU country in terms of standards and that accession talks are making "good headway." But it notes that joining the EU "remains a controversial issue" amid widespread belief that Icelanders will reject the union when it comes to a final referendum on membership.
Kosovo, which has no prospects of joining the union until all 27 member states recognise it as an independent country, is depicted as an economic and security basket case. The report notes that unemployment in the former Serb province is the highest in Europe and that "much more needs to be done to tackle organised crime and corruption."
It also adds that Brussels "takes very seriously" allegations that its prime minister, Hashim Thaci, ran an organised crime group 10 years ago that cut out and sold the internal organs of Serb prisoners and that continues to threaten the lives of potential witnesses in attempts to investigate the case today.