{"id":109708,"date":"2011-06-29T11:51:37","date_gmt":"2011-06-29T06:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=109708"},"modified":"2011-06-29T12:36:43","modified_gmt":"2011-06-29T07:36:43","slug":"turkish-parliament-opens-amid-opposition-boycott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/06\/29\/turkish-parliament-opens-amid-opposition-boycott.html","title":{"rendered":"Turkish Parliament Opens Amid Opposition Boycott"},"content":{"rendered":"

Turkey’s new parliament opened in a tense atmosphere on Tuesday as the main opposition party and Kurdish deputies boycotted the ceremony in protest over lawmakers kept in prison, AFP reports<\/strong><\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was hardly the start Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have hoped for after winning a third straight term in power in Jun. 12 elections and promising to reconcile with the opposition for a constitutional overhaul, his key election pledge.<\/p>\n

Shortly before parliament convened for oath-taking, the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) announced its members would shun the ceremony, following a boycott decision announced by Kurdish-backed lawmakers last week.<\/p>\n

CHP deputies did attend the general assembly but refused to take the floor when invited to be sworn in.<\/p>\n

Their Kurdish colleagues did not show up at all in Ankara, convening instead in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the restive Kurdish-majority southeast.<\/p>\n

The protest cannot block the functioning of the 550-member house, where Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) has a comfortable majority of 327 seats \u2014 it is rather aimed at putting the AKP under political pressure to seek a solution to the row.<\/p>\n

Erdogan, who has shown little sympathy for the jailed lawmakers, hinted his party might eventually agree to discuss legal amendments to secure their release.<\/p>\n

“Let them (the CHP) put forward their proposals first and we will speak afterwards,” Erdogan said, according to Anatolia news agency.<\/p>\n

His deputy Cemil Cicek scheduled a meeting with CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu for Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Defying a 2007 precedent, the courts last week refused to free nine opposition lawmakers elected while awaiting trial in prison, and the electoral board stripped one of them of his seat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Turkey’s new parliament opened in a tense atmosphere on Tuesday as the main opposition party and Kurdish deputies…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":109644,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[25479,28970,28632,10222,24162],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109708"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}