site.btaTurkish Court Delays Judgment in Opposition Party Case

At its hearing in Ankara on Monday, a Turkish court delayed yet again the delivery of its judgment in a case concerning the country's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP). The next, fourth hearing will take place on September 8, after the conclusion of the criminal proceedings and of an appeal against a decision to dismiss the case, the Turkish media report.

The lawsuit was filed by former Hatay mayor Lutfu Savas and several other CHP members. They seek an annulment of the party's 38th Congress in 2023, arguing that they had detected procedural irregularities and suspecting that Ozgur Ozel offered bribes for support in the race for the party's chairmanship. At that congress, Ozel replaced former leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

This is the first such case since 2017, when members of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) sued for annulment of an extraordinary congress of their own party. In that case, the court held that the congress and the governing bodies it had elected were unlawful.

Two camps have taken shape regarding the case: one backing the newly elected CHP leadership headed by Ozgur Ozel and also supported by the party's presidential hopeful Ekrem Imamoglu, who has been removed as Istanbul mayor and is jailed, and another one, demanding a restoration of the previous situation and reinstatement of Kilicdaroglu, known as the party leader who has not won a single vote during his 13-year-term in office.

Ozel sees a link of the case for the congress annulment with "the March 19 coup", which is how the CHP calls the arrest of Imamoglu and other CHP mayors on what they allege are "trumped-up" corruption charges.

"Today's hearing is obviously not result-oriented but is a political operation aimed at causing controversy in our party, interrupting our march to power, and breaking our resolve to fight. We will never deviate from our goal, we will never deviate from our path," Ozel told Mediascope on Monday.

"The delay of the case until the next judicial year meets with the approval of the Erdogan-Bahceli ruling coalition. The ruling quarters consider that if the allegations of irregularities at the congress are substantiated by tangible evidence, the court may rule that the decisions of the 38th Congress are null and void. However, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) representative on the High Election Commission, Recep Ozel, argues that the court is not competent to decide on this and draws attention to the binding nature of the High Election Commission's decisions," the Oksijen weekly writes.

Pro-government analyst Ahmeh Hakan, who is editor-in-chief of the Hurriyet daily, highlights the Kilicdaroglu factor, noting that the former CHP leader is looking forward to the court's judgment as a come-back chance.

"Kilicdaroglu  is terribly ambitious. In this way, he is causing the worst harm to the CHP. He is such a problem for the CHP that he can neither be discarded nor bargained away," the analyst writers.

The CHP will organize yet another rally in Istanbul on Tuesday evening to mark 100 days since the arrests of Imamoglu and the other CHP mayors. Twenty million signatures in support of Imamoglu's presidential bid have been collected, said Ozel, quoted by Turkish media.