Legal News

Turkey?s Constitutional Court Votes to Support Government, But Reins it In

By Dan Slater

Denver, Bulgaria, and now, to Turkey. The country’s governing Justice and Development party just barely escaped expulsion yesterday, as Turkey’s Constitutional Court handed a victory to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erodogan, the party’s leader and a former Islamist.

The country’s secular establishment, reports the NYT, had been challenging Erdogan, “a broadly popular politician whose supporters say that his past as a political Islamist is firmly behind him.” Here’s the WSJ’s report.

Six members of Turkey’s 11-member Constitutional Court (its seal is pictured) voted to close the Justice and Development party, known as the AKP, for violating the country’s secular principles, but seven votes were required. A ban would have brought down the government, forcing elections for the second time in a year and pitching Turkey into political chaos.

But the court did rein in the party, cutting its public financing in half and issuing a “serious warning” that it was steering the country in too Islamic a direction. Legislation pressed by the party that would have allowed women in head scarves to attend universities, for example, raised suspicions about its agenda.

The ruling was an “elegant solution,” Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the NYT. “If the AKP was a river that has overflown its banks, the court has set up embankments, forcing it back into its bed. It has not put a dam in front of it.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 31, 2008 (boomark / email).