Turkey should be treated the same as the other EU candidates

Speaking in an interview with the Anatolian News Agency, European Affairs Minister Dick Roche said that the EU would contradict itself if it applied different criteria to Turkey’s membership bid than those applied to other candidate countries.
Roche, whose country assumed the rotating presidency of the EU at the beginning of the year, said that the EU would decide on whether or not to open full membership negotiations with Turkey in line with the report of European Commission during term presidency of the Netherlands at the end of 2004.
A decision on whether to grant Turkey a date to begin accession negotiations would be made following an objective evaluation, not by prejudices, he said. As long as Turkey met all of the membership criteria there was no reason it should not be given a date for negotiations to commence, Roche said.