Paris, 20 June, 2006 – Greek Minister for Foreign Affairs Dora Bakoyanni said on Tuesday that Turkey must be admitted to the EU once it met all the pre-conditions.

“Greece supports Turkey’s efforts to full EU membership. (…) This is no ploy. It is no tactical game. It is a conscious strategy,” she told the WEU Assembly. Her view was that Turkey had progressed with reform, but still needed to consolidate its democratic system and ensure “respect for minority rights, freedom of religion and expression”. “Let me be very clear” she continued “if and when Turkey makes the necessary reforms, it must not be denied full entry to the European Union”.

Mrs Bakoyanni went on to say that Greece backed Serbia’s bid for EU membership. It should never be forgotten that Serbia was “a central country” and should not be humiliated. In her opinion, there could be no true stability in the Balkans without Serbia being part of it. However, in the absence of EU institutional reform, following last year’s rejection of the Constitutional Treaty by France and the Netherlands, no further enlargement could be undertaken under the current (Nice) treaty – it was just not possible.

On Cyprus, she urged politicians to forget “stereotyped reactions” and “forbidden words” in the effort to reunite the divided island. The solution should take the form of a UN proposal, acceptable to both the Greek and Turkish communities.

She pointed out in her address that one of Europe’s greatest challenges was to be able “to speak with one voice” and that the EU’s initiative in formulating new proposals to Iran on its uranium enrichment programme had been “positive, productive and constructive [in bringing] all interested parties to the table.”

Mrs Bakoyanni referred during the debate to the report entitled “Security and stability in the Mediterranean Region” prepared on behalf of the WEU Assembly Political Committee by Elsa Papadimitriou (Greece, Federated Group). The report, which was adopted unanimously, called on the EU to “concentrate for the moment on a policy of small incremental steps and pragmatic security cooperation, which may yield improved results.” The EU must exercise parliamentary oversight over defence and security in the southern Mediterranean, and “coordinate or even combine” its cooperation activities in the region with those of NATO to avoid duplication.

Presenting the report, Mrs Papadimitriou said that the EU had not progressed very far towards “the original objective of creating a common area of peace and prosperity in the Mediterranean region. The problems are still piling up fast, and the EU has to act rapidly and efficiently if it wants to be successful.”

The report also stated that despite Community investment of 3 billion euros a year under the Barcelona Declaration of 1995 establishing the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), income differences between the north and south continued to widen.


A major problem in the south, said Mrs Papadimitriou, remained a “lack of transparency in governance and of active popular engagement in political structures”. If the EU really wanted to make progress, it had to go beyond the region covered by the Barcelona Process and take in the Broader Middle East and the South Caucasus, and coordinate with US initiatives in the region. Action on migration had to take account of social as well as security considerations.

On the Middle East, the report urged a “lasting structural solution for transferring aid to the Palestinians”, stressing that it could not “ignore one of the few democratically elected Arab governments in the region.” Mrs Papadimitriou warned that the policy of isolating the Hamas Government and withholding aid to the Palestinians would no doubt lead to a severe economic depression, which was “likely to produce further radicalisation of the Palestinian population, drive Hamas into the arms of radical Islamic governments in the region and further aggravate the present downward spiral in Israeli-Palestinian relations.”