Following are the press statements made by President Talat and Parliamentarian Schulz:
Schulz: \"Thank you very much President. It is a pleasure for me to be with you. My parliamentarian group and the whole of my members support the process to come to solution for the island. The Cyprus question is one of the last unsolved question of the European Union and one of the problem is that we must independently from the negotiations - and the negotiations must go on independently - the presence of Turkish people of the Republic of Northern Cyprus within the European Union must be assured. I am grateful to you because you during all the years of our cooperation assured the presence of the citizens of your country in the EU and we, as social democrats in Europe -and I discussed with President Christofias just an hour hours ago - we hope and we insist that the negotiations must go on …(inaudible) because we need solution, we need conclusion at the end. Therefore I am grateful that we have the opportunity to discuss and to deepen and to exchange since 5 years now. Therefore thank you very much for the time you have for us.\"
President Talat: \"Thank you a lot. Thank you for your support. As in the past, we continue to work to find a comprehensive solution to the Cyprus problem. We believe that this is on one hand our own responsibility for our people for Turkish Cypriots, for Greek Cypriots, all over the peoples living on the island. Of course this responsibility can be actually extended to European Union also. As you know, this is the only country in the EU which has such a conflict and a divided country in the island. So we believe that our responsibility is for EU also. We are happy to be a part of the EU but unfortunately as you know, we could not succeed to unify our island before the entrance of Cyprus to the EU. In fact Turkish Cypriots are out of the EU, theoritically they are in but practice they are out. They are suffering from this division, they are sufferingfrom the non-membership let us say. So we try to expedite the process. I think the present need of the negotiations is to expedite the process, increase the phase of the process. Unfortunately it is quite slow and this causes disappointment among people. Wehave beennegotiating since one and a half years even more than that and we had to finish, conclude the agreement until now but we could not. People are looking for conclusions, concrete results from the negotiations and announcement ofthese results. We could not yet reach that stage. This also causes disappointment. Anyway we made quite good progress and I believe that with an encouragement of the EU, our counterparts will be more active and we will have more expeditious negotiation period hopefully. Your visit to the island is an important event. Thank you for this. This will help us expedite the process. That is our need. I hope every success for your visit and your work in the European Parliament. As you mentioned we are really in hurry to join the European Parliament also. We have two seats allocated for Turkish Cypriots in the EP but we are not occupying those seats. They are unfortunately occupied by Greek Cypriots. We are looking for having our seats back and being part of the EU and hence the EP. Thank you for your support and your visit. It is a good opportunity and pleasure to meet you.\"