Church in the World

Pledge to uphold rights of Christians

Turkey

The Turkish Government has agreed to settle long-standing grievances on the part of religious minorities as a precondition for the country's accession to the EU.

The Rome-based AsiaNews agency said the pledge had been made to the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, during a second round of talks last weekend with Turkey's Foreign, Education and Justice ministers.

It added that the patriarch had urged the restitution of properties belonging to the Orthodox Church, including a theological academy at Heybeliada that was forced to close in the early 1970s, insisting that alleged legal obstacles were outweighed by the 1922 Treaty of Lausanne guaranteeing religious minority rights.

Christians have often complained of discrimination in Turkey, whose 32,000-member Catholic Church has vicariates in Istanbul and Anatolia and an archdiocese at Izmir, but is still seeking juridical recognition.

In an October address to the Council of Europe, President Abdullah Gul said Christians could now practise their faith safely in the country, which hopes to join the European Union by 2015. However, church leaders and human-rights groups have expressed concern at recent anti-Christian incidents, including the brutal April killing of four Protestant publishing-house workers at Malatya.

In June, Turkey's Supreme Appeals Court ruled that Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who is recognised as honorary primate of the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians, was authorised to perform religious functions only among the country's 6,000-strong Greek Orthodox community and had no right under Turkish law to call himself "ecumenical".

In its report, AsiaNews said that government representatives at the Istanbul talks had praised the contribution of religious minorities to the "centuries-old rich inheritance" of Turkey, most of whose 67 million inhabitants are Sunni Muslims.

However, the agency said foreign diplomats had warned that the "will to settle minority problems" by the Islamist-led Government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party was re-elected in July, had "surfaced rather in discussions than in practice", and could be set back by a recent rise in nationalism in response to attacks by Kurds.

Legislation to protect religious minorities was demanded in a late October European Parliament resolution, which also called for Christian Churches to be given the right to own property and train clergy.