Top court dismisses CHP Ankara mayoral candidate’s appeal over election result

ANKARA

Mansur Yavaş and the CHP filed separate appeals ordering a re-run of the contested mayoral race in Ankara.

Turkey’s top court has dismissed two separate appeals from the main opposition party concerning the contested local election result in the capital Ankara, citing lack of jurisdiction.

The main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) candidate for Ankara in the March 30 local elections, Mansur Yavaş, as well as the CHP itself as an institutional body, filed separate appeals ordering a re-run of the contested mayoral race in the city.

However, the Constitutional Court on July 23 dismissed both appeals, citing lack of jurisdiction over the subject matter. It also stated that individual applications can only be filed with regard to rights covered in the European Convention on Human Rights, but the convention does not include local elections within the scope of individual applications.

Meanwhile, the Court also dismissed two separate appeals filed by CHP deputy Mahmut Tanal and the Liberal Democrat Party (LDP), who both argued that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan should have resigned before becoming a presidential candidate.

The Court also dismissed these two appeals citing lack of jurisdiction.

Another individual appeal from Fenerbahçe chairman Aziz Yıldırım was also rejected by the Constitutional Court on the same day.

Yıldırım had argued that his rights were violated during Turkey’s long-running football match-fixing case. However, the Court ruled that as the retrial of the case had already started at a local court, all domestic remedies had yet to be exhausted, thus dismissing Yıldırım’s appeal along with appeals by two defendants in the same case, Yaşar Kaya and Yüksel Ekşioğlu.