International

Europe must not watch silently from the sidelines as Turkey’s Constitutional Court bans the Kurdish political party the DTP. At the request of SP Senator Tiny Kox, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is for this reason working on a declaration against the undermining of Turkish democracy.

"Earlier we saw a threat to the current premier Erdogan’s party, and the Council of Europe successfully protested against that,” says Kox. “Now the democratically elected MPs from the Kurdish party have been driven out of parliament. That is a scandal which we must not accept from a Council of Europe member state. Otherwise we will never see peace or real democracy in Turkey."

According to the Turkish Constitutional Court, the Kurdish DTP has close links with the resistance movement the PKK. This judicial interference is threatening the brittle peace process instigated this year by Premier Erdogan. The DTP will take the court’s ruling to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The call from the SP Senator, who chairs the Left group in PACE, won broad support, including from the chair of the Turkish delegation, Mevlut Cavusoglu of the AK party, who will shortly take over as the assembly’s president.