Statement by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of AKEL, Stefanos Stefanos, after the meeting with the All Party British Parliamentary Group for Cyprus
Today we had a meeting with the British Parliament’s All Party Group on Cyprus. We took advantage of this meeting to inform the Group on the current phase in which the Cyprus issue is at, as well as about what needs to be done in order to make it possible to lift the deadlock and continue the negotiations on the Cyprus issue with the aim of achieving a solution. We have stressed that, bearing in mind the fact that Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot leadership have officially moved towards a two-state solution, the only realistic way for us to be able to achieve the resumption of negotiations and have a realistic chance of resolving the Cyprus problem is to continue the negotiations from the point where they were interrupted in Crans Montana in 2017, to preserve the convergences that have been achieved after long and hard efforts, and at the same time to negotiate on the outstanding issues of the Guterres framework. We also had a discussion with the friends of Cyprus about the need for the British Parliament, and with their own intervention in various ways, to exert influence on Turkey to change its negative stance, to return to the negotiating table with the aim of finding a solution to the Cyprus problem. Finally, we thanked the Cross-Party Group of the British Parliament for its continued positive stance on Cyprus and the solution to the Cyprus problem, and at the same time we exchanged views on how its members can continue to help in this direction.
