Turkey faces a potential "triple whammy" of blows to its European Union membership bid later this year unless re-elected Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan moves quickly to enact human rights reforms, EU diplomats say.
Ankara's accession talks, launched in October 2005, have already been slowed to a trickle by the suspension of part of the negotiations over its refusal to open its ports and airports to traffic from EU member Cyprus.
Now the Turks face a negative European Commission progress report, renewed pressure from Cyprus, and French demands for the EU to discuss setting final borders, with Turkey on the outside.
"Erdogan needs to push laws through the new parliament on freedom of expression, the rights of religious minorities and other fundamental freedoms quickly to give the Commission something positive to report," a senior EU official said.
Without that, the annual progress report due on Nov. 7 is bound to conclude that reforms have virtually ceased over the last year, he said.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn made the point forcefully in congratulating Erdogan on Sunday's landslide general election victory for his Islamist-rooted AK party.
"We need in particular to see concrete results in areas of fundamental freedoms such as freedom of expression and religious freedom," he told a news conference on Monday.
"I trust that the new government in Turkey will immediately relaunch the reform process so we can produce results (before) our next progress report in early November."
"INSULTING TURKISHNESS"
Joost Lagendijk, co-chairman of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Assembly, said the top priority was to amend or abolish article 301 of the Penal Code, used repeatedly to prosecute writers and journalists for "insulting Turkishness".
