July 06, 2007	Friday	Jamadi-us-Sani 20, 1428

ANKARA, July 5: Turkey’s Constitutional Court on Thursday rejected demands to annul government reforms introducing the election of the president by popular vote, a major victory for the Islamist-rooted ruling party.

The court's deputy head Hasim Kilic said a simple majority of the 11 judges on the panel ruled against the demand by Turkey's current president and the main opposition party to cancel the package of constitutional amendments.

“Six of our judges ruled that there was nothing unconstitutional about the reform package,” Kilic told reporters here. “The package is still in force.” The ruling means that President Ahmet Necdet Sezer will now submit the proposed reforms to a referendum, widely expected to be held in the autumn.

A senior member of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which drew up the reforms, hailed the ruling as a way out of the long-running deadlock over electing the next head of state.

“The nation will now be able to elect its president on its own free will,” Bulent Arinc, an AKP member, was quoted by the Anatolia news agency as saying.

The Turkish people will provide the solution to the presidential elections “which have turned into a gordion's knot,” Arinc added.

Turkish law requires that referendums be organised 120 days after the president approves constitutional changes. Since the amendments were published in the official gazette in late June, a referendum can be held in late October at the earliest.

The AKP rushed the reform package through parliament last month in a bid to resolve a political crisis that blocked the election of its presidential candidate by a vote of parliament, as the current law requires.

The reform package also calls for a once-renewable, five-year presidential mandate instead of the current single, seven-year term, and provides for general elections every four years instead of five.

Sezer, who has often clashed with the government, initially refused to sign the bill into law and sent it back for reconsideration to the AKP-dominated parliament, which voted it through a second time unchanged.

As the president does not have the authority to reject a law twice, Sezer asked the constitutional court to annul the reforms arguing that they were adopted hastily and with no “justifiable, acceptable reason” to change the presidential electoral system.

The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) also said that the reform package was unconstitutional. It alleged that the balloting rules had been breached when the AKP rushed the reforms through parliament last month.

Kilic said the judges had voted unanimously to declare that the alleged breaches were outside their jurisdiction. The AKP launched the constitutional reforms after having twice failed to get its presidential candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, elected because of an opposition boycott of the vote in parliament.

The elections were called off after the Constitutional Court, petitioned by the CHP, said voting could not be held without a two-third majority quorum, which the AKP could not muster.

The stand-off forced Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to bring elections forward to July 22 from November.

The prospect of an AKP president prompted mass pro-secular rallies and a stiff warning from the army that it was ready to defend Turkey's secular order.—AFP