Press Release from the LFI – NUPES Parliamentary Group in Support of Free and Fair Elections in Turkey – No To Criminalisation of the HDP, 13.03.2023
While general, legislative and presidential elections are announced for May 14 in Turkey, the dictator-President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is continuing his policy of criminalising the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
The HDP – the third largest group in the Turkish National Assembly and the party of the democratic alternative – has suffered from this kind of repression since 2016, after having contributed to Erdogan losing his parliamentary majority in 2015.
In January 2023, the Turkish Constitutional Court ruled for the cessation of public funding of the HDP. This kind of harassment has continued after other major events: the imprisonment of HDP President Selahattin Demirtas and around twenty members of Parliament, the dismissal of a hundred HDP mayors of many large cities, the arrests and arbitrary imprisonment of 10,000 activists…
This Tuesday, March 14, the Constitutional Court will have to rule on the procedure aimed at banning and dissolving the HDP. Turkey, a member of NATO and of the Council of Europe, cannot continue to get bogged down in this anti-democratic decline without some form of reaction on our part.
We call on the international community and the French government to press for an end to the prosecution and criminalisation of the HDP, thus ensuring the holding of truly free and democratic elections in Turkey.
Source: lafranceinsoumise.fr