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| Turkey's ruling party in court to fight against ban |
| 2008-07-03 |
| Turkey's Islamist-rooted ruling party defended itself in the country's highest court Thursday against charges that it had sought to undermine the secular system and should be closed down. Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek and Bekir Bozdag, a senior lawmaker from the Justice and Development Party (AKP), arrived at the Constitutional Court at 0700 GMT to present their case to judges in a closed session. On Tuesday, chief prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya had argued before the 11-judge tribunal that the AKP should be banned for threatening one of the basic tenets of the republic. Yalcinkaya launched proceedings in March, accusing the AKP, which was re-elected to office last year with 47 percent of the vote, of gradually seeking to replace the secular system with Sharia law. He also asked the court to bar 71 party officials, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, from party politics for five years. The AKP, the offshoot of a now-banned Islamist movement, rejects the charges and says the case is politically motivated. |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |