Turkey’s Islamist-rooted ruling party on Thursday presented its final defense in the country’s highest court against charges that it had sought to undermine the secular system and should be closed down.
The hearing at the Constitutional Court, which lasted more than six hours behind closed doors, was the last opportunity the Justice and Development Party (AKP) had to refute the charges before the 11 judges reach a verdict.
The case is the latest episode in a bitter struggle between secularist forces and the AKP, which won a decisive re-election victory last year despite a divisive campaign that focused on the party’s alleged Islamist leanings.
The court will now appoint a rapporteur to pen a non-binding recommendation on a verdict. The judges will then set a date to debate the case behind closed doors before making a ruling.
“We do not want this case to drag on, but it is up to the court to draw up the timetable” for a verdict, Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek told reporters after the hearing.
Cicek and senior AKP lawmaker Bekir Bozdag — both of them lawyers — represented the party.
Cicek declined to give details on what arguments they pressed, saying only that the defense was based on the European Convention of Human Rights, among other legal norms, and maintained the case should not have been opened at all.
The court’s vice-president, Osman Paksut, was quoted by Anatolia news agency as saying that the judges could deliver their verdict “within four to five weeks.”
The case has been advancing amid simmering political tensions following a police operation against a shadowy anti-government grouping on Tuesday, which saw 21 suspects, among them two retired generals and senior journalists, detained by police.
The mass-circulation Sabah daily said on Thursday that documents seized in the operation indicated the group was about to activate a plan to gradually destabilize the country and oust Erdogan’s government.
Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya launched the case against the AKP in March, saying the party should be banned for seeking to replace Turkey’s secular system with Islamic sharia law.
Yalcinkaya, who argued his case in the court on Tuesday, has also asked that 71 AKP officials, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, be barred from party politics for five years.
In Ankara political circles, talk is already forming of a back-up plan to create a new political party which, in the event of a ban being applied, would be able to integrate Erdogan, Gul and the others.
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