Turkey-EU rights gap widening: Timmermans

Turkey's crackdown on the media and reported human rights abuses are pushing the country further away from Europe even as it hopes to join the European Union, a senior official for the bloc has said.

"The distance between us and Turkey is not decreasing; it is increasing because of human rights, the media and what is happening in civil society," European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans told EU lawmakers April 28, according to Reuters. 

"If they want to come close to the European Union so badly let them prove that they can," the former Dutch foreign minister said.  

Human rights and media freedom groups have repeatedly sounded the alarm over the limited tolerance of dissent shown by authorities in Turkey.

Timmermans noted concerns raised by lawmakers during the session at the European Parliament about curbs on media freedoms and human rights in Turkey but argued that opening further discussions on eventual Turkish membership of the EU - an element of a Turkey-EU migrant deal - would be a way to engage Ankara and convince it to change tack. 

Timmermans is a key negotiator of the widely criticized EU-Turkey agreement to stem the flow of migrants to Greece, where Turkey started taking migrants back from Greece after March 20 in exchange for the EU taking the same amount of Syrian refugees from Turkey. Turkey was also given pledges that its citizens will obtain the right to visa-free travel inside the bloc if it meets necessary criteria, as well as promises of accelerated accession talks and a total of 6 million euros of funds to be used for Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Meanwhile, the EU's humanitarian aid commissioner, Christos Stylianides, said April 28 that the highly contested EU deal with Turkey may not...