Turkey's prime minister hit back on Saturday at moves by a chief prosecutor to have his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) banned, while an EU official warned against "meddling" by the courts in the country's politics.
"The action taken yesterday is not aimed at the [AKP] but the will of the nation," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a party meeting in the southeastern town of Siirt, broadcast on television.
Erdogan was responding publicly for the first time to the formal decision of Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, chief prosecutor of the court of appeals, to ask the Constitutional Court to ban the AKP on the grounds that it opposed the country's secular system.
Erdogan, noting that 16.5 million people had voted for the AKP in elections last July, added, "No one can say that these people are a focal point of anti-secular activities."
Attacking Yalcinkaya, he warned that "those responsible for such shame and injustice will suffer the consequences of this irresponsible recourse."
Erdogan said the AKP, which emerged in 2001 from a banned Islamist party, was fighting for democracy, and stressed its economic achievements since 2002.
The prosecutor called for the AKP to be barred and 71 people, including Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, to be banned from political activity, said Hasim Kilic, the president of the Constitutional Court, on Friday.
The court is to meet today to decide whether to accept the complaint, which charges that the AKP has become a focal point for attempts to overturn the strictly secular ethos that underlies the Turkish Constitution.
The Turkish prosecutor's action brought a warning from EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn as Turkey seeks to implement reforms in its quest to join the EU.
"In a normal European democracy, political issues are debated in the parliament and decided through the ballot box, not in the court rooms," Rehn told reporters in Brussels.
"The executive shouldn't meddle into the court's work, while the legal system shouldn't meddle into democratic politics," he said.
Turkish Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin expressed his "consternation" at the move on Saturday, but said that the AKP and Turkish democracy would emerge strengthened.
"We should not make Turkey the graveyard of political parties," the Anatolia news agency quoted him as saying.
The Constitutional Court has in the past banned every party accused of anti-secular activities, among them the Welfare Party of Turkey's first Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, who used to be Erdogan's mentor.
Another leading AKP member, parliament speaker Koksal Toptan, said that "no one can move Turkey backwards" and that the party respected the principles laid down by the founder of the secular Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Television reports said that prosecutor Yalcinkaya, who had been drawing up his indictment for several months, had accused the AKP of trying to infiltrate all the institutions of the State to establish an "Islamist-inspired" system.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS