EGEMEN BAGIS DELIVERS A SPEECH AT THE BIOMETRICS SUMMIT

Minister for EU Affairs and Chief Negotiator Egemen Bagis attended the Biometrics Summit in Istanbul and indicated that Turkey has made significant progress in biometric technologies. 

Mentioning the R&D expenses in Turkey, Bagis said “The R&D expenses in 2010 have increased 3 times compared to those of 2002 and has reached 9 billion liras. Today, the R&D expenses are equal to one percent of the national income. Our 2023 target is to increase this ratio to 3%. The R&D personnel (full time equivalent) number has reached to 82 thousand in 2010 and the number of researchers has reached 64 thousand.”

Regarding the biometrics passports, Bagis said “Turkey’s switching to biometric passports was one of the most important requests of the European Union. Most of the EU countries believed that this was hard for Turkey to accomplish. They believed that, since Turkey had a large population compared to other countries, it would be hard to switch to the biometric passports and to enhance its supervision. However, with the support of many of our friends here in this room now, Turkey did its share and solved this problem. Now, we have some other restrictions, but we will also struggle with them.”

Minister Bagis indicated that as the Ministry they were following technological developments closely and that the main agenda of his Strasbourg visit would be the lifting of the unfair visa requirements for Turkish people. Indicating that the European Commission has prepared a roadmap, Minister Bagis added the following:

“We are paying a visit to Strasbourg to utilize this process and to share our arguments about the issue as we don’t want to encounter any surprises in the road map the European Commission would prepare for Turkey. I hope the EU would escape the eclipse of reason at once and realize that the visa requirements for the Turkish people ate actually giving harm to the Europeans rather than the Turks. These visas should be lifted as soon as possible for Europe to benefit from the potential of Turkey.”