Turkey has met fewer than half the conditions for its citizens to be granted early visa-free travel to the European Union, just 10 days before a deadline for it to meet the requirements, an EU official told lawmakers on Thursday.

The EU promised last month to extend visa liberalization to Turkey by the end of June in return for its agreement to take back all illegal migrants who cross to Greece from its shores, provided it fulfilled all the so-called benchmarks.

The executive European Commission is due to report to member states and the European Parliament on May 4 whether Ankara has met the goals, and has set April 31 as a cut-off date for Turkey to pass the necessary measures.

Marta Cygan, a director in the Commission`s migration and home affairs department, told a European Parliament hearing that Ankara now satisfied in full or almost entirely 35 of the 72 conditions.

"The Turkish authorities have definitely been accelerating the implementation of administrative and legal reforms allowing them to fulfill the requirements," she told lawmakers.

Visa-free travel for Turkey, a nation of 79 million, is controversial among the 28 EU states, even though they would not be allowed to work or stay longer than three months.

Some fear it would open doors to more Muslim migration to a bloc already struggling with the biggest influx of refugees and migrants since World War Two.

Arrivals of migrants and refugees on Greek islands have dropped sharply since the EU-Turkey agreement went into force on March 21, but Ankara threatened to walk away from the deal should it not get visa liberalization in June.

During the hearing, lawmakers insisted Turkey should only be granted easier travel terms if it fully satisfies all the criteria. Some also criticized the migration accord with Ankara over human rights concerns.

"I am personally very much in favor of visa liberalization with Turkey and many other countries. But we are mixing things up here. We have the migration agreement with Turkey and one does get the impression that we are selling ourselves here a bit," Dutch member Sophia in `t Veld said.

"Visa liberalization - yes, but we shouldn`t relax the criteria, they should meet all the criteria... Let`s stick to the criteria we always apply because only then we will be credible to our own citizens and the Turks."

Cygan said the visa liberalization dialogue was a good tool to improve Turkish standards on document security, migration management, public order and fundamental rights.

Ankara had to share more information on fraudulent documents used to travel to the EU, issue more biometric passports and grant access to its labor market and other services to non-Syrian refugees who sought shelter in Turkey, she said.

She added that a backlog of 140,000 asylum applications must be sharply reduced, that Roma people living in Turkey should be better integrated and that Ankara must establish an independent body to monitor for any rights abuses by law enforcers and state authorities.

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