Turkey: legal loopholes

This week, Turkey's top court will hold its first hearings in a case aimed at outlawing the ruling AKP government for 'Islamist activities'.

A state prosecutor will give evidence to support his bid to close the governing party -- re-elected with an overwhelming majority last July -- on Tuesday and the AKP will respond with an oral defence two days later. The situation is now the very definition of a constitutional crisis, writes Grenville Byford in Newsweek.

Who is being unconstitutional, wonders Byford. The country's Constitutional Court has overruled the National Assembly, declaring that two constitutional amendments passed in February were in fact unconstitutional. Yet the Assembly may amend the Constitution with a 65% majority, and the requisite majority was obtained. Byford concludes that judges just disliked the amendments' content, and points to a more fundamental passage of the same Constitution, which states that Turkey is a "democratic, secular and social state governed by the rule of law." He predicts the judges will argue that the amendments they struck down effectively amended this article.

Turkey's judiciary, which aims to clip the wings of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government, and, if possible, to bring it down and then block its return to power, has deployed such tortuous reasoning and sophistry before to usurp the rights of parliament. Last year it used similar tactics to invalidate the election of President Abdullah Gul. This time round it will drag its feet in order to inflict maximum damage on the AKP: if the party is outlawed, it may have no time to regroup under another name before the local government elections in March 2009.