Turkey said Monday it would not back down from its refusal to grant trade privileges to Cyprus despite an EU warning that Ankara's failure to comply by the first week of December would have consequences for its troubled membership bid.

"We stand at the point we are. A new step is out of the question," the government's spokesman, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, said after a weekly cabinet meeting.

"Turkey's policy is very clear and determined," he said. "It is the EU authorities who have failed to fulfill their promises."

Turkey refuses to open its sea and air ports to Greek Cypriot use under a customs union protocol that it signed with the EU last year, arguing that the bloc should first deliver on promises to ease the economic isolation of the breakaway Turkish Cypriots.

Earlier, Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, said that "if there is no agreement and Turkey does not honor its commitments, the EU will need to consider the implications for the accession process."

Vanhanen said he wanted the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, to quickly make a recommendation on Turkey so the bloc's foreign ministers can weigh their response at a meeting on December 11.

The row is threatening to derail Turkey's accession talks a little more than a year after they started in October 2005.

The EU made promises to ease economic sanctions imposed on the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) in April 2004 after the Turkish Cypriots, encouraged by Ankara, voted in favor of a UN plan to resolve Cyprus' 32-year division.

The plan was massively rejected by the Greek Cypriots, whose government in the south is internationally recognized as the Cyprus government and who joined the EU in May that year without the Turkish Cypriots.

"The parties which were in favor of a settlement are now being forced to make new concessions. This is not fair," Cicek said. "Therefore, we say that it is up to the European Union, and particularly the Greek Cypriots, to move forward."

Cyprus has been divided along ethnic lines since 1974 when Turkey seized the north in response to an Athens-engineered Greek Cypriot coup in Nicosia aimed at uniting the island with Greece.

The TRNC is recognized only by Ankara.