Ruling party executive considers Constitution, top court to be ‘hobbles’

BURSA

AA Photo

A senior executive of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has suggested that both the Constitution and the Constitutional Court have been hampering the government’s work, describing them as a “hobble.”

AKP Deputy Chair Ekrem Erdem, speaking in Marmara region of Bursa on Oct. 18, focused on his party’s preparations for the parliamentary elections scheduled for June 2015.

The AKP should get the required majority to amend the Constitution in the 2015 elections, Erdem said, while explaining how he legally couldn’t intervene to ban a notorious video of a person who recently recorded his farewell speech before committing suicide.

“It was almost like an advertisement for suicide. If I cannot intervene in this, what I can intervene in? There are a lot of similar things. In most of the cases, the Constitution and the Constitutional Court are acting as a hobble,” Erdem was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu Agency.

In several cases, the country’s top court has rejected government-led legislation in favor of fundamental rights and freedoms, at the cost of infuriating governmental officials. Of those rulings, its decision against the government’s Twitter ban and its partial annulment of a judicial law was particularly welcomed by international organizations and institutions.

A parliamentary panel tasked with drafting the country’s first civilian Constitution was officially dissolved in December 2013, after nearly two years of futile work.

The current 1982 Constitution is effectively a legacy of the Sept. 12, 1980, coup. It replaced the Constitution of 1961, which was also drafted following a military coup.