EU set to continue Turkey talks

The European Union is to continue membership negotiations with Turkey at the end of June despite newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy saying that the country should not join the EU.

The European Commission has sent two draft common positions to the Council of Ministers for negotiations on economic and monetary policy and statistics and will shortly produce a third on financial controls. Once the draft positions have been approved in Council, negotiations with Turkey on these three areas can start. They are expected to take place in the final week of June, after the EU summit on 21-22 June, possibly on 26 June. Ali Babacan, Turkey’s chief negotiator, is expected to attend the session in Brussels.

Confirmation that the negotiations would be launched on schedule came after Sarkozy said in Brussels on 23 May that "Turkey does not have a place in the European Union". Sarkozy has proposed a privileged partnership for Turkey and said that the country should join a Mediterranean Union of states bordering the EU’s southern flank.

But European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, speaking alongside Sarkozy at a press conference, confirmed the EU’s plans to carry on with negotiations. "We are in favour of continuing negotiations with Turkey and we will defend the continuation of negotiations," he said.

The German presidency has made a commitment to opening negotiations on three areas of EU policy by the end of June.

Ending a long pause in the talks, the EU last month began negotiations with Turkey on enterprise and industrial policy, only the second chapter Ankara has managed to open since it began talks on science and research in June 2006.

The EU decided to suspend talks on eight chapters in December 2006 after Turkey failed to open its ports and airports to planes and vessels from the Greek part of Cyprus.

French officials point out that France is not likely to veto the opening of talks in the three new chapters.

But Sarkozy has made it clear that, while it may be possible to launch negotiations on new chapters, closing them is a different matter.

His comments have drawn strong criticism from Ankara. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned that France’s position could have an impact on its bilateral relationship with Turkey. A spokesman for Foreign Minister Gül said: "The aim of the negotiations which Turkey has started has been defined as nothing other than integration [into the EU] as a full member."

EU officials will travel to Ankara on 4 June to meet their Turkish counterparts to discuss the way forward.

• An adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said that national parliaments should be able to decide whether to accept countries’ applications to join the EU as a way to avoid repeating the mistake of starting talks with Turkey. Centre-right MEP Alain Lamassoure told European Voice that the current procedure for accepting countries’ applications needed to be extended to decide whether a country qualified as ‘European’.

He said that when a country applied for membership the Council of Ministers should take account of the views of national parliaments. "If we had used this procedure we would not have started negotiations with Turkey," he said, because some national parliaments would have indicated their unease.

He said that Article 58 of the proposed EU constitution that was rejected by France and the Netherlands was a good basis for deciding whether to accept applications for membership from new members. The article says that the EU should be open to "all European states which respect the [EU’s] values". The Council decides by unanimity whether to accept an application after consulting the Commission and obtaining the consent of the European Parliament. National parliaments have only to be informed of applications but, under the constitution, they have no formal influence over the decision to accept a country’s membership application.

The European Union is to continue membership negotiations with Turkey at the end of June despite newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy saying that the country should not join the EU.