İlerleme Raporları

Within the scope of the European Commission's 2015 Enlargement Strategy, it made a series of changes in the methodology of progress/country reports, making them much more rational and strategic. Reports, which do not generate as much excitement and interest in candidate countries as before, have become much more interesting with different techniques and new formats. Although the technical aspect of the negotiation process is more prominent in the reports, political criteria remain the essence of the report. In this context, the Commission mainly criticizes Turkey in its reports issued after the failed coup attempt on July 15th, especially on the proportionality of the measures taken under the state of emergency, the rule of law, allegations of human rights violations and judicial independence. The Commission also includes the progress and positive developments made under the political criteria about which it criticizes Turkey the most. This study covers the reports published especially after the July 15 coup attempt in this respect and reveals what the advances recorded under the political criteria are, what their numbers are and under which headings they appear. The political criteria of the four Turkey/Progress Reports (2016, 2018, 2019, 2020) are the focus of the study. Content analysis was used as a research method. Each report is encoded according to the common themes determined under the category of advances recorded and the data are presented in tables. In addition, as the data are evaluated on the prominent developments in Turkey-EU relations during these periods, an analysis-context relationship is tried to be established. As a result, it has emerged that Turkey's political reform process has not stopped but has slowed/decreased, despite the fact that relations with the EU have come to a standstill. It was also concluded that the only area where a good progress was made in the basic category of advances recorded in political criteria was "migration and asylum policy". It is seen that the areas of decline/backsliding in political criteria are increasing faster, especially in the last two reports (2019, 2020) periods.