Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-27-Speech-3-135"
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"en.20020227.8.3-135"2
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"Mr President, President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, when Turkey embarked upon a constitutional review process last autumn, my group immediately visited the country in order to initiate an in-depth dialogue with the government or the Grand National Assembly and with representatives of civil society. Unfortunately, we quickly became aware of the limits of this process. We were refused permission to visit Mrs Leyla Zana, the Sakharov prize-winner, and other former MPs of Kurdish origin, who are still in prison. Whilst the human rights organisations welcome every advance that is made, the sheer number of specific cases they deal with demonstrate how much work still needs to be done before we see the democratic Turkey that we all hope and pray for.
We did not expect, however, to find out some weeks later from the President of the HADEP party himself, Mr Murat Bozlak, that he was summoned before the Constitutional Court to face a likely ban on the political party that he leads. In order to encourage the European Parliament to react strongly to this extremely serious and arbitrary development, we immediately invited President Bozlak to come and meet all the groups and proposed sending a parliamentary delegation to Turkey. I welcome the unanimous support for both these initiatives. The only crime that HADEP has committed is that of continuing to gain influence throughout Turkey, to the point where it is now guaranteed, if elections were to be held, that it would enter parliament, in spite of a specially made law, which sets a 10% minimum score for parties to be represented in parliament. I also welcome the fact that we decided, by means of a resolution which all the groups support, to send a clear message to the Turkish authorities, and the following statement, in particular: ‘The European Parliament calls for the case against HADEP to be dropped’. I therefore propose that together we undertake to ensure that this is done. It is the very least that we can demand of a country that will tomorrow be taking part in the Convention on the future of Europe."@en1
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