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The EU is considered to use conditionality strategy to transfer its norms to candidate countries. The EU offers material benefits and expects candidate countries to comply with its criteria. Hence, the EU externally promotes values such as minority rights in non-member states through conditionality strategy. However, it is widely accepted that responses to such external pressures varied greatly. Although Turkey is considered to be a textbook example of how effective conditionality strategy can be, the country showed varied responses to EU conditionality. This paper takes the example of minority rights to demonstrate how Turkish response fluctuated even in the same reform area. Comparing the AKP government's policies towards Turkey's Kurdish and Alevi citizens it will be claimed that although the AKP challenged the tradition state policies which is based on the Treaty of Lausanne in terms of significantly improving rights of its Kurdish citizens, it was less enthusiastic in doing the same for the Alevi. Hence, it shows a selective compliant behaviour in response to EU demands in the area of minority rights. Thus, it can be argued that the party exploits EU norms as external reference points when necessary while ignoring them in issues that conflict with their own ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]