The European Parliament on Thursday condemned Turkey’s “targeted expulsion” of foreign Christians and journalists, calling on Ankara to immediately stop.
A majority of EU lawmakers backed a non-binding resolution demanding Turkey ends “judicial and administrative harassment of foreign journalists”.
They also urged Turkey to stop using administrative codes to identify at least 300 foreign Christian people as “national security threats” and “to allow arbitrarily expelled individuals to return”.
The Alliance Defending Freedom International, a Christian advocacy group, this month said there were 20 pending cases before the European Court of Human Rights “brought by Christians” whom Turkey “effectively banned from re-entry”.
It added they could not return “solely for living out their faith”.
A US government watchdog report last year said there were “national security bans on foreign national Protestant clergy who have legally resided in Turkey”.
Turkey has firmly rejected the accusations.
“The claims that Turkey deported foreign nationals from some Christian communities after assessing them as a ‘national security threat’ are entirely baseless,” the presidency’s counter-disinformation centre said.
The allegations were “part of a deliberate disinformation campaign targeting Turkey”, it said in a statement in October.
Turkey has in recent years also targeted foreign reporters with criminal cases and deportations, including a BBC journalist who was expelled in March 2025.
Last year’s crackdown on media came after the arrest in March of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the top opponent of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Also in that same period, a Swedish journalist was arrested on arrival to cover the mass protests and later convicted of “insulting the president”.
Ties between Turkey and the EU have been strained for nearly a decade over many issues including what Brussels says is Ankara’s democratic backsliding.
Another thorny issue has been tensions between EU state Greece and Turkey over gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean, but there are hopes of improved ties after Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited Ankara this week.
With multiple geopolitical shocks and war in Ukraine raging, the EU sees Ankara has an important partner in a changing world order.
Of importance to both is the long-standing desire to modernise the EU-Turkey customs union but for real change, that would require concessions that the two sides might find too difficult to make, EU officials say.
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