POLITICS AND LAW

Parliamentary Immunity in Turkey: Nightmare For MPs as Pandora’s Box Opened Once and For All

First They Came For Kurds, Then For All: The Story of Parliamentary Immunity in Turkey.

Turkish Parliament in a general session.

In May 2016, Turkey’s main opposition party Republican People’s Party (CHP) offered full-throated support for a draft bill envisaged by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and envisioned the removal of parliamentary immunity of lawmakers involved in serious crimes. What those crimes would be were subject to legal machinations as much as the dynamics of realpolitik shaped by the ruling party’s unquestioned monopoly over the semantics of the law and political debate. Yet, the bill’s intended target was no secret: lawmakers from the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP).

In CHP’s endorsement laid a subtle but supremely naive assumption that the bill, if it ever became the law of the land, would hit President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party members like a boomerang back in the future. But what followed since then has only accentuated the fact the law became a very useful political weapon frequently deployed by the president’s party to re-design the landscape of parliamentary politics to their liking. The bill only worked against opposition parties, leaving…