EU foreign ministers said on Tuesday the bloc would not open new areas of membership negotiations with Turkey but defied calls by Austria and European lawmakers to halt the process entirely in protest over Ankara's security crackdown ensuing a botched coup.
"I don't have the impression these negotiations have had a positive impact on Turkey," Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said on arriving for a ministers' meeting in Brussels.
He added that Turkey had been moving away from the 28-member bloc.
"Turkey has moved further away from the European Union and over the last month, this development has increased in terms of drama and speed,"Kurz said.
The bloc has been vocal in its criticism of Ankara's sweeping cleansing after the failed July putsch but is wary of upsetting Turkey too much as it needs its cooperation on curbing immigration to the bloc, as well as on the conflict in Syria.
"It's not possible to go further as business as usual. We need to explain that it's very difficult to see such a lot of arrests and reactions in Turkey and so we will say, 'Sorry, it's impossible to open new chapters for the accession process," Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said.
Turkey jailed some 36,000 people pending trial and sacked or suspended more than 100,000 over their alleged support of the coup plotters. EU worries Erdogan is using the coup as a pretext to go after his critics.
Little progress has been achieved in over a decade to bring Turkey and the European Union together and the latest souring of relations between the two makes any new advancement politically difficult, the European Commission said.
"The accession negotiations have come to a standstill for months and I don't see any movement in the next couple of months," said the EU's enlargement chief, Johannes Hahn.
Germany spoke firmly against a formal freeze of the accession talks of Turkey, a mainly Muslim country of 79 million people.
"That''s why it is ever so important that we don't put anything (accession negotiations) on hold and that it has to be a very clear signal by the European union: we continue to build on sending a signal to Turkish citizens who share our European values and we feel obliged and connected to those people," said the country's European Affairs minister, Michael Roth.
EU leaders are unlikely to agree a formal halt of the accession process, which would be a slap in the face of Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan, when they meet in Brussels on Thursday (December 15).
Diplomats said the EU is instead mulling shifting pre-accession funds it is giving to Turkey to direct them more firmly at the civil society.
It has also said the accession process would come to an automatic end should Ankara reinstate the death penalty.
REUTERS