Turkey’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesman Tanju Bilgic called the European Parliament’s report urging the EU member states to recognize the Armenian genocide "problematic and controversial in all the aspects.”

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The European Parliament’s report urging the EU member states to recognize the Armenian genocide is concerning and "far from historic reality,” Turkey’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesman Tanju Bilgic said Saturday.

“We regret that this [European Parliament’s] statement is problematic and controversial in all the aspects,” Bilgic said in a statement published on the ministry’s website.

The European Parliament’s Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy published earlier this week called “ahead of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, on all the Member States legally to acknowledge it, and encourages the Member States and the EU institutions to contribute further to its recognition.”

The Armenian Genocide refers to the Armenia’s claims of the Ottoman government’s extermination of Armenians in their historical homeland during the First World War.

Yerevan says that over 1.5 million Armenians were killed during the mass genocide.

Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, refuses to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Ankara argues that the number of people killed is hugely exaggerated, and that the Ottoman Empire was simply responding to Armenian attacks on Turkish population while it was trying to establish the Armenian state on the Anatolian peninsula.

Commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire will take place in Yerevan on April 24, 2015.