Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock will not be meeting her Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu on Thursday as planned earlier in the week.
Baerbock cut her visit to Pakistan short after testing positive for COVID-19, and cancelling the next steps of her trip to Greece and Turkey.
The minister took office earlier this year as part of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens coalition. The trip was the first high-level foreign visit by her government.
In the cancelled meeting, the pair were scheduled to discuss the Russian-Ukrainian war and disruptions in global food supply chains, Turkey’s objections to Sweden and Finland’s NATO bids, and human rights violations against opposition circles in Turkey as well as Kurdish politics.
The ministers would have also discussed Turkey’s planned attacks in north and east Syria.
Human rights are universal and they are necessary to defend the Uyghurs, Ukrainians, Kurds and Yezidis, Baerbock said at the German parliament before she embarked on the trip.
The Western bloc, including Germany, are in the wrong for their carrot-and-stick policy regarding autocratic regimes, she added.
While in the opposition, as co-chair of the Green Party, Baerbock had offered harsh criticism against Turkey’s human rights violations and repression of the Kurds.
She had critisised the occupation of Afrin and then Serekani in the north-west of Syria.
Meanwhile her constituents criticised the photos from her meeting with Çavuşoğlu at a NATO summit in March.
