Meeting of the &nbsp;Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs on the&nbsp;report on the progress by Turkey in fulfilling the requirements of its visa liberalisation roadmap, in the EP in Brussels. Statements by Marta CYGAN, Director, DG HOME (EC), Sophia IN'T VELD (ALDE, NL), Marie-Christine VERGIAT (GUE/NGL, FR).

Brussels

exchange of views

meeting

EU - Türkiye (T)

Enlargement to Türkiye (T)

VERGIAT, Marie-Christine (GUE/NGL, FR)

IN 'T VELD, Sophia (Renew, NL)

Report on progress by Turkey in fulfilling the requirements of its visa liberalisation roadmap: extracts from the exchange of views

SOUNDBITE (English), Marta CYGAN, Director, DG HOME, European Commission, The Turkish authorities evidently have been accelerating the adoption of legal and administrative reforms allowing them to fulfil the requirements. As I said in the second report we refer to 72 benchmarks and we say 35 of them are fulfilled or almost entirely fulfilled.

SOUNDBITE (English), Marta CYGAN, Director, DG HOME, European Commission, What we would like to see progressing in the time we have ahead of us is sharing with Member States law enforcement agencies information on forged and fraudulent documents of passengers travelling to the EU because this requires further improvement.

SOUNDBITE (English), Marta CYGAN, Director, DG HOME, European Commission, The Turkish authorities are expected to impose visa requirements on the nationals of countries which pose a high migratory risk, some of them, and allow for non-discriminatory visa free access to all the EU Member States citizens, we are talking here about still 11 Member States that are not in the same position. Then it is extremely important that the draft regulation that is granting to the non-Syrian asylum seekers and refugees rules for accessing work permits that this regulation, which is similar to those granted to Syrians in January, that this draft which exists already that it will be soon signed.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sophia IN&apos;T VELD (ALDE, NL), Visa liberalisation, yes, but we shouldn't relax the criteria. They simply have to fulfil all the criteria. We have been talking about visa liberalisation for a long time so I don&rsquo;t understand why all of the sudden everything is possible. Why this was not possible a year ago or two years ago or five years ago? I think that we should also keep in mind that we are setting a precedent here because we cannot treat other countries in different manner.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sophia IN'T VELD (ALDE, NL), Let&rsquo;s work towards visa liberalisation according to the road map and stick strictly to the criteria that we always apply because only then we will be credible both to our own citizens and to the Turks. Thank you.

SOUNDBITE (French), Marie-Christine VERGIAT (GUE/NGL, FR), The NGO reports and what&rsquo;s been said by the UNHCR and the UN and Amnesty International and those who are on the field, all of that is sending an alarm bell with regards to the situation in Turkey, what&rsquo;s happening there. Just an example: the border between Turkey and Syria is closed, and there was an incident a few days ago on the border where the Turkish border police shot using live ammunition to Syrians trying to cross the border and they even shot at Syrian children!