Addressing the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday (September 23, 2026), President of Cyprus Nikos Christodoulides strongly criticised Turkey and accused it of violating the territorial integrity of Cyprus by illegally occupying its territory.
Christodoulides’s remarks came a day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressed the UN General Assembly and called for the recognition of northern Cyprus, which is under the illegal occupation of Turkey.
“I call on the international community to recognise the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus [sic] and to establish political, diplomatic and economic relations with it,” Erdoğan had said.
“The sovereign equality and equal international status of the Turkish Cypriot people must be guaranteed, and the inhuman isolation to which they have been subjected must now be ended,” he added. Erdoğan also invoked international law, sovereignty and territorial integrity, in the context of Palestine and Gaza.
Erdoğan’s statements were countered by Christodoulides, who described them as the “hypocrisy of the highest form”, asserting that the Muslim majority nation continues to illegally occupy the northern part of Cyprus’ territory.
“I listened very carefully to the speech of President Erdogan yesterday: references to International Law, to the respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states, to illegal occupation, to the drama of refugees. Yet, in relation to Cyprus, Turkey is doing exactly the opposite. Hypocrisy of the highest form,” Christodoulides said.
The Cypriot President urged the Turkish President to walk the talk and follow the UN Charter that he quoted in his address. “President Erdogan also quoted extensively from the UN Charter. But politicians are judged not by their words but by their deeds. Mr. Erdogan, if you want to quote from the Charter, you must first apply it,” Christodoulides added.
The President of Cyprus, @Christodulides, just exposed Erdoğan’s hypocrisy from the UN podium: Türkiye lectures the world on “occupation” and “territorial integrity,” while Turkish forces remain in northern Cyprus and Syria. pic.twitter.com/2R0ZjnJOCp
— Danny Danon 🇮🇱 דני דנון (@dannydanon) September 23, 2026
The Cypriot President said that Turkey has been occupying more than a third of Cyprus’ territory for 52 years in a “flagrant violation of international law”. “Fifty-two years have passed since the illegal Turkish invasion of Cyprus. An act of aggression, violating the core principles of the UN Charter,” he pointed out.
He called out Turkey for defying the UN Security Council Resolutions passed under the framework established by the UN to solve the long-standing conflict. “For 52 years, the tens of thousands of displaced and their descendants have been prevented from returning to their homes. For 52 years, Varosha remains sealed off, with Turkey still in defiance of its clear and very specific obligations set out in the relevant UN Security Council Resolutions,” Christodoulides said.
Christodoulides added that Cyprus was ready to resume negotiations with Turkey from where they were left off in 2017 to achieve a “functional and viable solution” to the problem. He emphasised that the people of Cyprus will not accept division of their territory. “…division will not be accepted. This cannot and will not be the future for my country and my people. Ever. Our determination to reunify our island is firm,” he stated.
The Turkish occupation of Cypriot land
The remarks of President Nikos Christodoulides come in the context of an over five-decade-old territorial conflict between Cyprus and Turkey. The island country of Cyprus accommodates two prominent communities, the Greek Cypriots, who are in the majority, and the Turkish Cypriots, who are in the minority.
In 1974, the coup broke out in Cyprus, backed by the Greek military junta, which intended to merge the island with Greece. Turkey launched a military intervention claiming to protect the constitutional order of Cyprus and protect Turkish Cypriots. However, at the end of the conflict, Turkey controlled almost the entire northern part of Cyprus, which made up roughly 36% of Cyprus’s total area. It renamed the area the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC).
Later on, in August 1974, a UN-brokered ceasefire froze the front lines and created a buffer zone called the “Green Line”. The zone divided the island into the Turkey-occupied north, accommodating Turkish Cypriots, and the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus in the south. Several attempts have since been made for the resolution of the problem, but all of them resulted in deadlocks.
