Presidential Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs Photis Photiou has once more urged Turkey to allow access to so called military areas in Turkish occupied Cyprus where it is believed that there are the remains of missing persons since the Turkish invasion in 1974.

Photiou, who continues his contacts with the parliamentary parties, held a meeting today with President of the Social Democrats` Movement EDEK, Marinos Sizopoulos, whom he briefed on the humanitarian issue of the missing persons.

In statements after the meeting, Fotiou said that the success rate of the Committee of Missing Persons is below 10% and stressed that the EU should be concerned about this rate since it is the main donor of the program.

Photiou said that the parliamentary parties in Cyprus, through their contacts in the EU and the European Parliament, could contribute to the effort to convince Turkey to cooperate by giving access to certain areas in occupied Cyprus for exhumation.

The EU, he said, is aware of the low percentage of success and noted that the EU must exert its pressure on Turkey to cooperate.

On his part, the President of EDEK said that his party, through its Cypriot deputy at the European Parliament, will undertake an initiative to inform the EP about the state of affairs as regards this humanitarian issue.

The Committee on Missing Persons` objective is to recover, identify, and return to their families, the remains of 2001 persons (502 Turkish Cypriots and 1,493 Greek Cypriots) who went missing.

The CMP employs a bi-communal forensic team of more than 60 Cypriot archeologists, anthropologists and geneticists, who conduct excavations throughout the island and anthropological and genetic analyses of remains at the CMP Anthropological Laboratory.

The Republic of Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when Turkey invaded. It still occupies 37% of this EU Mediterranean country, despite repeated calls by international and European organizations to withdraw its troops from the island.

UN-led Cyprus talks are under way with the aim to reunify the island under a federal system.