Erdoğan ally Bahçeli suggests reorganization of top court 'in line with presidential system'

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Turkey's Constitutional Court should be "restructured in accordance with the nature of the new government system," according to Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Chair Devlet Bahçeli.

"He recent decisions of the Constitutional Court are painful and crooked. In the name of rights violations, irreparable damage is done to national rights and the sense of justice," he said in a written statement yesterday (September 30).

Bahçeli's remarks came after an exchange between Minister of Interior Süleyman Soylu and Constitutional Court President Zühtü Aslan over the court's recent decisions of "rights violations."

Soylu had started the debate in mid-September when he criticized a top court decision repealing a law article prohibiting demonstrations and protest marches on intercity roads.

"Then, you do not need to have police protection. Go to work by bike, then. Go ahead, cycle back and forth to work, we are free, right? Why do you have police protection?" he had said.

In response, Aslan, without mentioning the minister's name, accused him of "misleading the public" by making criticism without a reasoned decision.

Soylu then targeted the court's decision on the Academics for Peace, who stood trial for publishing a declaration about the 2015-2016 conflict in the mostly Kurdish-populated provinces, which he said was a "terrorist declaration."

"An institution of putschists"

Behçeli went on to say that the Constitutional Court was founded after the 1960 military coup "for the protection of the non-democratic structure that was attempted to be established by putschists."

The Supreme Court of Justice, which was established upon the temporary law No. 1 by the plotters of the coup, "usurped the authority of jurisdiction," he added.

"This illegitimate and tainted structure was the one that judged the nation's will in Yassıada and sentenced the prime minister and ministers at the time to death," Bahçeli further said.

He suggested that the court should be restructured in accordance with the presidential system, which was adopted after a referendum in 2017. The new system had already changed the structure of the top court. (EMK/VK)