The Turkish parliament cannot ratify Sweden’s NATO bid: Kalın
Türkiye is “not in a position” to approve Sweden’s NATO bid, as the latter has failed to take action on Ankara’s concerns about terrorist groups, the president’s spokesman said on Saturday.
“We are not in a position to send a (ratification) law to parliament,” presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalın told reporters.
Kalın said they could not send the legislation on Sweden’s NATO bid because some lawmakers may choose not to ratify it.
“We have a serious problem with this,” he said.
Kalın also said it would take at least until June for Sweden’s parliament to vote on the measures and that Ankara would wait for all Swedish legislation to pass before acting.
“It will take (Sweden) about six months to write and adopt the new laws,” he said. “They’re going to need a little more time.”
In November, Sweden’s Riksdag adopted a new anti-terror law which is expected to enter into force in the spring of next year and enable “further criminalization of participation in a terrorist organization or prohibition of terrorist organizations”.
The sides reached a tripartite deal on June 28 at a NATO summit in Madrid, where Stockholm and Helsinki pledged to address Turkey’s security concerns and meet critical demands such as tougher anti-terror laws and the extradition of terrorist suspects.
On Sunday Sweden’s prime minister said Stockholm could not meet all of Ankara’s conditions for approving its application for NATO membership. “Türkiye has confirmed that we have done what we said we would do, but they also say they want concessions that we cannot make, the ones we don’t want to make,” he had claimed.
However, Kristersson said he respected Ankara’s right to make its own decision on ratification.
Alarmed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the two Nordic nations discarded their longstanding policy of military non-alignment. They applied to join NATO in May, but the process has been delayed by the Turkish government’s objections to their joining on security grounds.
To win Ankara’s hard-earned approval, Stockholm extradited three people, including a PKK terrorist member, to Türkiye in early December. Ankara welcomed the development but said it was “not enough” for a green light. As of the new year, Sweden has also entered into force a constitutional amendment that enables “greater opportunities to use legal means to limit freedom of association for groups that engage in or support terrorism”.
However, Sweden’s Supreme Court last month refused to extradite a prominent FETÖ suspect, Bülent Keneş, in a move that displeased Ankara, with Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu declaring that the country was “not even halfway through fulfilling the commitments” it made to secure their support .