ANKARA: The parliament of Turkey approved a bill to ratify a protocol on Finland’s accession to NATO on Thursday. All 276 lawmakers prese...
ANKARA: The parliament of Turkey approved a bill to ratify a protocol on Finland’s accession to NATO on Thursday.
All 276 lawmakers present in the parliamentary hall voted in favor. Therefore, Finland has obtained legal grounds for joining the alliance.
At the same time, the lawmakers said that Sweden, which filed a NATO membership bid jointly with Finland, has not fulfilled the provision of its memorandum with Turkey as of yet, and was therefore not ready to join the alliance.
Turkey was the remaining NATO member to approve Helsinki’s bid. Earlier, the process was also delayed by Hungary, but the country passed a relevant bill on March 27.
In May 2022, Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership, however, their entry bid was immediately stonewalled by Ankara. Turkey demanded that the Nordic countries declare Kurdish organizations to be terrorist ones, extradite persons to Turkey, who are accused of terrorist activity or aiding and abetting the 2016 coup d’etat attempt, along with removing bans on arms supplies to Turkey. In order to settle these differences, the three countries signed a joint memorandum in the run-up to the NATO summit in 2022. The document contains a roadmap of practical measures that the two northern countries are to take if they want to join the military alliance.
Ankara later reconsidered its attitude toward Helsinki, noting that it generally complied with the terms of the agreement.
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