The Republic of Cyprus is one of the original signatories of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act establishing the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was renamed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1995.
From its independence from the United Kingdom in 1960 until 1974, Cyprus was governed by a slowly unraveling power-sharing arrangement between its Greek and Turkish Cypriot populations. A Greek Cypriot coup that year caused the arrangement to collapse and prompted a Turkish military invasion. Turkey justified its invasion by invoking the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee under which Turkey, Greece, and the UK have the prerogative to intervene militarily to preserve the original power-sharing status quo in the country. To this day, United Nations peacekeepers patrol a buffer zone between the southern two-thirds of the island controlled by the Republic of Cyprus and the northern third controlled by the self-proclaimed Turkish Cypriot administration, backed by tens of thousands of occupying Turkish soldiers.
Alongside nine additional countries, the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union (EU) in 2004. Despite the island’s de facto division, the whole of Cyprus is EU territory. Cyprus has been a member of the Council of Europe since 1961.
Staff Contact: Bakhti Nishanov, senior policy advisor
