In the EU enlargement process, the EU sets conditions for the associated countries. These conditions were designed to minimize political and economic instabilities of the candidate countries’ before they became members of the European Union. Terrorism is one of these sources of political instability which might undermine the democratic governance of the candidate country. Through the conditionality strategy the EU not only monitors the democratisation process in general, but also screens other substantial political changes in the social sphere such as counter-terrorism policy. In this regard this paper seeks to analyse the impact of the EU conditionality on Turkey’s counter-terrorism strategy towards the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). This study will focus on the legal changes in the counter-terrorism approach of Turkey against PKK under three sub-domains (a) human rights (b) minority rights and (c) adoption of counter-terrorism related with acquis in Justice and Home Affairs and within the following periods: 1995-1999, 1999-2004 and 2004-2011. It will be argued that there was a strong correlation between the EU conditionality and its influence on Turkey’s compliance with the international norms. Depending on the reducing level of the EU conditionality from 2007 the EU influence on Turkey’s counter-terrorism strategy slowed down significantly due to the changes in Turkey’s expectations towards the EU membership. However, after 2007 Turkey continued to comply with the European norms since the compliance with these norms started to be seen as the most appropriate solution to end this domestic problem
