Sarah Ludford MEP

Sarah addresses the European Parliament on the closure of Turkey's Kurdish party

12.00.00pm GMT Mon 14th Dec 2009

Sarah Ludford (ALDE). - Mr President, I want to deplore the deeply worrying decision of the Turkish Constitutional Court on Friday to close the Democracy Society Party, which represents largely Kurdish interests, and to ban from politics its leading MPs. This is a very retrograde step and will be used as a pretext to return to violence by extremists. It closes off the democratic political option which the Prime Minister, Mr Erdogan, has said he wants to pursue.

One of the problems is that the AK Party Government has failed to reform the very law which was used to close the Democracy Society Party - in fact, the law under which the AK Party itself almost got closed. So this is not in the interests of the Government of Turkey or its people.

The ALDE Group will be calling for a plenary debate on this subject as early as possible in the new year because it is a really bad step backwards for Turkey.

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Previous news story: Closure of Turkey's Kurdish party would be major setback for EU accession (Fri 11th Dec 2009).
Next news story: Brussels loses patience with Harriet Harman over UK gay employment discrimination (Mon 14th Dec 2009).

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