ANKARA, 4 June 2005 — Turkey’s President Ahmet Necdet Sezer yesterday vetoed a government-sponsored law reducing penalties for unauthorized schools teaching the Qur’an, arguing that it infringed on the secularist principles of the Muslim-majority country.
The provision was part of a package of amendments to the Turkish penal code, spearheaded by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), a conservative movement with Islamist roots.
The article, which would have enabled those convicted of opening and running illegal educational institutions to escape with a fine rather than a jail term of up to three years, triggered accusations that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government is condoning religious fundamentalism.
Islamist activists in Turkey often run schools teaching the Qur’an, where — free from government control — they are accused of breeding religious hard-liners. Sezer, a staunch secularist who has often clashed with the government, said in a statement that he had returned the law to Parliament for reconsideration because it “is encouraging the opening of illegal educational institutions.”
The principle of secularism “is the cornerstone of the values on which the Turkish Republic is founded,” he said. “It is obvious that the country’s unity in the future will be endangered by the perverted mindsets of citizens educated in illegal separatist and religious educational institutions,” he said.
The Parliament will now review the law, and if it passes it for a second time unchanged, Sezer has no other option but to approve it. He can, however, ask the Constitutional Court to annul the legislation. The controversial provision was introduced by the AKP as a last-minute change to a package of penal code amendments during a parliamentary debate last week.
The main opposition boycotted the session and charged that the AKP has a secret Islamist agenda, even though it has disavowed its roots. Sezer’s veto also effectively halted several other amendments to the penal code aimed at addressing widespread concerns over press freedoms.
The package would have notably scrapped provisions envisaging increased penalties for some offenses if they are committed via the media, such as slander, insult to the president and incitement to war against Turkey.
Press groups, however, have denounced the changes as inadequate on the grounds that journalists may still end up in prison, even though jail sentences were purged from the press law in another reform last year. Turkey’s new penal code, which the vetoed package was to amend, took effect Tuesday.
Despite the misgivings of the press, the code, a key European Union demand from membership candidate Turkey, has been generally welcomed for introducing a more liberal justice system, in particular increasing penalties for human rights abuses and significantly improving the rights of women and children.
Meanwhile, jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan does not want to be retried in Turkey, where he believes he cannot be judged fairly, one of his attorneys told AFP yesterday. “My client does not want to be retried in Turkey. He does not want to be judged under the current circumstances,” said Aysel Tugluk, who met with Ocalan on Wednesday in the island prison of Imrali, where he is serving a life sentence for treason.
Last month, the European court of Human Rights ruled that the Kurdish leader should be retried on grounds that his 1999 trial, in which he was sentenced to death for treason, was unfair. That sentenced was commuted to life in prison in 2002.
