ANKARA, 11 July 2004 — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday he wanted to relax laws banning the use of Islamic headscarves in private universities, less than two weeks after Europe’s top human rights court ruled Istanbul University was justified to expel a veiled student.

“If there are legal obstacles to this, then we have well-known institutions that can remove them,” Anatolia news agency quoted Erdogan as saying.

One of the “institutions” Erdogan was referring to is Parliament, where his Islamist-based Justice and Development Party (AKP) has an absolute majority.

But the prime minister insisted there was a need to find a “social consensus” on the issue, which is an extremely sensitive one in Turkey.

Turkey is a mainly Muslim country but has a secular system which is enshrined in the constitution and is fiercely guarded by the powerful army and the intellectual elite. Supporters of secularism see the wearing of the headscarf as a clear sign of support for an Islamic political system.

Women are strictly banned from wearing headscarves in the civil service and the country’s public and private universities.

On Friday Erdogan, whose wife wears the headscarf, complained during a television broadcast that the laws and authorities of the higher education council were too rigid.

The head of the council, Erdogan Tezic, is adamantly opposed to relaxing laws that ban the wearing of headscarves in private universities such as that in Istanbul.

Tezic, an expert on constitutional law, said it would be impossible to decouple the rules governing private and public education establishments without amending Turkey’s basic law.

In a ruling that upheld secularism as a basic guarantee of democracy, the European Court of Human Rights said on June 29 that Istanbul University had not violated the rights of medical student Leyla Sahin by refusing her permission to enroll because she insisted on wearing a headscarf.

The court stressed that “religious symbol had taken on political significance in Turkey in recent years” and said its ruling “did not lose sight of the fact that there were extremist political movements in Turkey which sought to impose on society as a whole their religious symbols and conception of a society founded on religious precepts.”