Turkey’s political prospects for a new constitution are likely to see serious ups and downs given tensions over a latest court ban on a number of newly elected lawmakers, U.S. political analyst predicted.
“What has happened in the last couple of days shows us that the process of making a new constitution in Turkey will be complicated and hard,” Henri Barkey with the Carnegie Endowment told Thursday a Washington conference on Turkish politics in the wake of the June 12 parliamentary elections.
An criminal court in Istanbul on Thursday ruled against the release of two newly elected lawmakers, Mustafa Balbay and Mehmet Haberal from the main opposition party in Turkey, who were behind bars in an investigation on Ergenekon, an alleged secret network of senior army officers, academics, businessmen and others who have been on trial since October 2008 on charges of plotting to use terrorist methods to overthrow the Turkish government.
In a separate case, Turkey’s election supervising agency barred Hatip Dicle, an independent lawmaker, from entering the parliament due to a past conviction, stirring tensions in Turkey’s southeast.
Barkey said drafting a new constitution was the major challenge ahead for Turkish politics, adding, “the constitution has to change, not just for the settlement of the Kurdish issue but for democratization as well.”
Friday, 24 June 2011
A.A.
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