Turkey wants high-level summit to broker visa deal with EU

Despite ongoing sound and fury in ties between Turkey and the EU, efforts to accomplish a long-standing deal on granting visa-free travel to Turkish nationals in return for implementing the refugee Readmission Agreement have reached a critical point, with officials from Ankara and Brussels developing a formula to overcome the stalemate on the definition of terror.

"[Vice President of European Commission Frans] Timmermans made some proposals to us in October. As the justice, interior, foreign and EU ministers, we made our assessments on these proposals. We will introduce them to our prime minister next week and then to our president," EU Minister Ömer Çelik told reporters on Nov. 29 in Brussels.

Çelik made this comment before his scheduled meeting with Timmermans on Nov. 30, in which the two officials will further discuss the content of the proposals. "There are surely some things that I will tell him and he will tell me," he added.

The comprehensive migrant deal between Turkey and the EU stipulated the implementation of visa liberalization for Turkish nationals by the end of June in the event that Turkey fulfilled 72 criteria cited by the European Commission. Turkey delivered 65 of them but failed to change its anti-terror law amid the campaign against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Visa liberalization was first postponed to Nov. 1 but developments after the failed July 15 military coup attempt made it impossible. Ankara urged Brussels that the end of the year was the deadline of the deal, saying that if negotiations fail so will the Readmission Agreement.

"I am not sure whether there could be a new process in the new year. But this process is about to...