The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) presented its defense at the Constitutional Court to allegations of anti-secularism filed against it by a state prosecutor in March of this year. The indictment demands a ban from politics on 71 former and current AK Party members and seeks to shut down the AK Party for its alleged attempts to gradually Islamize Turkey's regime.

It took State Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek and deputy parliamentary group chairman Bekir Bozdağ six hours to finish reading the AK Party's 177-page verbal defense at the country's top court on Thursday. The AK Party posted the defense testimony on its Web site yesterday.

The AK Party’s defense explained that the AK Party had not become a “focal point of anti-secularist activity” and asserted that in democracies party closures were extremely rare exceptions. The testimony argued that the AK Party is not a danger for the democratic order and accused Supreme Court of Appeals Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya, who penned the indictment, of putting forth political and ideological arguments rather than legally sound claims. The testimony said the AK Party is not a “moderate Islam” project as the prosecutor claims it is, and denied all charges that it has questioned the existence of any constitutional agency and also denied charges that it sought to shape society’s understanding of secularism along the line of religious sects.

The testimony said: “The AK Party has no purpose to and has not attempted to transform the constitutional system into a regime based on religious rules. The AK Party has never aimed to establish Shariah law and the establishment of multiple legal systems.” It argued that the passage of a constitutional change sponsored by the government to lift a ban on wearing the headscarf at universities was a parliamentary decision and that it was not binding on any political party.

“Political parties are agencies that act as mirrors in reflecting the societal realities of a country. In reality, political parties are sociological facts. A successful democracy cannot be set up by ignoring this reality. If political parties are mirrors reflecting the sociological and social reality, removing a mirror does not mean the fact itself was removed. The fact finds another way to surface.”

Party closure equal death penalty

The statement also recalled that the existence of political parties is ensured by legal guarantees in democracies and that shutting down or banning parties was tied to very severe conditions that are very difficult to be fulfilled. “A sanction in the force of closure can destroy the essence of freedom of political parties, and this is why banning parties is always seen as a last resort and a way out of very complicated situations. For, shutting down a political party is tantamount to the execution in the case of individuals. It is universally accepted that banning political parties arbitrarily would damage the core of the pluralistic democratic regime.”

The testimony noted that the prosecutor in his indictment had presented the AK Party’s attempts to draft and adopt a new constitution for Turkey as proof of its “hidden agenda” to change the regime. On this point, the AK Party statement asserted that planning to change the Constitution through peaceful methods cannot be seen as proof of shutting down that party. “Political parties can only be banned when they exercise or defend violence or use violence as a political tool to destroy rights and freedoms and to remove the democratic constitutional order.”

The defense statement also criticized the indictment for the evidence it presented, saying they were reduced to news clips of party members’ various and separate statements and stated that the case was a restriction of freedom of expression of individuals. Had the criteria of the European Court of Human Rights been taken into consideration, the indictment said, the closure case would never have been filed. “Let alone being a close or distant threat to democracy, the AK Party has become the only party of this country’s democrats,” it said.

It also said most of the newspaper stories that were put into the case file had not been fact checked. They were taken out of context and they were made up of interviews and mistranslated from other languages.

In the verbal defense statement the AK Party also denied the prosecutor’s claim that the AK Party is the continuation of parties previously shut down for Islamism. “The indictment seeks to show our party as a continuation of certain parties of the past. The purpose of this is easy to understand. But this attempt is being made in vain. The AK Party was established in 2001 as a brand new political party and has shown this not only in speech, but also in deed.”

todayszaman