ANKARA, Sept 6 (AFP) - Turkey has taken giant steps to improve its democracy in order to make good on its bid to join the European Union, but still has a long way to go in ensuring the proper implementation of reforms ahead of a key EU decision on whether to begin membership talks, observers said.
"In terms of legislation, the government has fulfilled some 90 percent of the Copenhagen Criteria, but implementation is around 60 percent," Beril Dedeoglu, an EU expert at Galatasaray University, told AFP.
"We are going through a painful harmonization process," she said.
Since 1999 when it was granted candidate status, Turkey has passed a raft of reforms in order to meet the Copenhagen criteria, a set of political and economic standards required to begin accession talks.
The government now argues that it has fulfilled most of the criteria and has earned the right to get a date for membership talks from EU leaders when they assess Ankara`s progress in December.
Although Turkey has taken some ground-breaking steps such as abolishing the death penalty and granting its Kurds the right to broadcast and teach in their mother tongue, it is still faltering on some reforms, according to Husnu Ondul, the chairman of the Turkish Human Rights Association.
"What we tend to see are inconsistent practices. While a judge in one city acquits a defendant in line with recent reforms, a judge in another city condemns another defendant over the same charges," Ondul said.
He pinned down the discrepancy to a lack of training and the resistance from some law-enforcement officers and members of the judiciary to changing their mentality.
"The government must show more willpower and effort to get the reforms off the ground," he said.
The hitches in the implementation of refroms was among the points raised by EU enlargement chief Guenter Verheugen on Monday at the start of an official visit to Turkey before the European Commission pens a crucial report on Ankara`s prospects of starting membership talks.
The commission`s report, which will assess Turkey`s progress towards meeting European norms, will constitute the basis on which EU leaders will make their decision in December.
"We will not hide the fact that there are difficulties in some areas and that of course implementation is not complete, but that`s normal," Verheugen told reporters here.
But he had words of praise for Ankara`s efforts to clean up its poor human rights record, saying there was "important progress" in eliminating torture.
But Ondul disagreed.
"In 2003, 1,391 people from 29 provinces applied to us with complaints of being tortured in more or less the same manner. The fact that so many people unaware of each other were tortured in similar ways only shows how widespread the practice is," he said.
He also underlined several lawsuits in which policemen accused of torture are likely to escape unpunished because of statute of limitations.
"You cannot talks of democracy when torture cases run for 14 years," he said.
The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledges that it has more to do when it comes to implementing democracy reforms, but has underlined that it is a lengthy process to change entranched attitudes and mentalities.
Ferai Tinc, a diplomacy columnist from the mass-circulation Hurriyet daily, agrees that Turkey cannot be expected to become perfect overnight and should be allowed to grow inside the EU.
"There are deficiencies but the European Union itself is a process of development. The government has sincerely demonstrated its will to improve and is hard at work," she told AFP.