The Coalition for the International Criminal Court announced Sept. 4 that Turkey will be the focus of its monthlong campaign for global justice in September. The coalition, which is composed of 2,500 nongovernmental organizations in 150 countries, is demanding that Turkey ratify the Rome Statute — the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Speaking to Al-Monitor, Gunal Kursun, president of the Human Rights Agenda Association and member of the Turkish National Coalition for the ICC, said that although being a member of the ICC is not a benchmark concerning the entry into the European Union, the 2013 Progress Report also mentioned that “Turkey did not sign the statute of the International Criminal Court.”

“While there are so many other bilateral and multilateral treaties that Turkey is not a signatory of, I believe it is attention-grabbing for the Turkey-EU relationship that this has been noted in the Progress Report,” Kursun said, noting that all EU member countries are signatories to the ICC.

With the start of the accession talks with the EU in 2004, Turkey actually expressed a willingness to ratify the Rome Statute. In that framework, then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government made an amendment to Article 38 of the constitution “clarifying the distinction between the extradition of nationals to a foreign country and surrender to the ICC, removing a potential obstacle to accession,” Kursun said.