Legal News

Turkey?s High Court Agrees to Hear Case on Banning Ruling Party

By Dan Slater

Last month, the Law Blog wrote about the interesting interplay in Pakistan between President Musharraf and the country’s judiciary. Declaring a state of emergency in November, Musharraf placed scores of judges, including the Chief Justice, under house arrest. Last week, they were released.

Now Turkey, Pakistan’s neighbor to the west (separated, of course, by Iran), is dealing with the opposite dynamic. Yesterday, Turkey’s highest court — the Constitutional Court (its seal is pictured) — decided to hear a case on shutting down the governing party and banning its political leaders. The announcement, according to reports, moves Turkey closer to a showdown between observant Muslims and secular elites as to which group will rule the country. (Here are articles from the NYT and the WSJ. Click here and here for reports from the Financial Times.)

Alifeyyaz Paksut, deputy chairman of the Constitutional Court, said the court’s justices had voted unanimously to hear the case, which calls for shutting down the Justice and Development Party — known by its Turkish initials, AKP — and banning 71 of its members, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from politics. In addition, 7 of the 11 justices voted to hear a ban on the AKP president, Abdullah Gul.

The case, filed by Turkey’s top prosecutor, calls for banning the AKP, comprised of observant Muslims, on the grounds that it has taken Turkey, whose citizens are mostly Muslim, away from secularism. The secular elite includes Turkey’s military and judicial systems.

According to the Times story, the 162-page indictment charges that because of PM Erdogan, Turkey is now seen as a “moderate Islamic republic,” an image that it says has become the official view in the U.S. It cites former Secretary of State Colin Powell as “having defined our country” that way, “disregarding the fact that Turkey is a secular democratic state.”

Law Blog Reading Recommendation: A central debate between Turkey’s religious and secular parties is whether the current ban on women wearing head scarves in universities should be lifted. “Snow,” a recent novel by Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk, cuts to the heart of that issue. In the book, a native Turk returns to his country to report on an epidemic of suicide among teenage girls, the latest of whom is one of the “head-scarf girls,” a group of women who have been barred from the secular university for covering their hair.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 31, 1969 (boomark / email).