AKEL first reaction to EU-Turkey Summit final text

AKEL C.C. Press Office, 18th March 2016, Nicosia

 

This is a first reaction and we reserve the right to set out our comprehensive position after we study the final text and receive the anticipated briefing from President Anastasiades. After a difficult week which culminated in today’s EU-Turkey Summit concluding an agreement between the two sides, we have it appears avoided negative developments for the Republic of Cyprus. Chapter 33, whose opening is provided for in the relevant agreement, is not included in the chapters which the Republic of Cyprus had unilaterally frozen. At the same time of course, we issue a warning that the text agreed heralds the exercise of additional pressures and that the danger of the instigation to an opening of other chapters too has not disappeared. We therefore urge the President of the Republic to be vigilant.

As for the tackling of the on-going refugee crisis, we state in the most categorical terms that the EU proves to be incapable to give substance to its otherwise frequent declarations about solidarity and humanism. On the contrary, its efforts demonstrate that the EU’s main objective is the restriction of the refugees outside EU Member State’s borders without taking into account International Law and the Geneva Convention, indeed at the same time as its own responsibilities for the creation of the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War are not minor.