Separation of powers must be redefined - Erdogan

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said he is strongly bound to the principle of the separation of power, clarifying his earlier statement that this fundamental principle was the main obstacle for his government, Hurriyet reports.

“The strongest supporter of this principle is my party [Justice and Development Party - AKP]. No one should try to distort this. I have just outlined our disturbances,” Erdoğan said in an interview with NTV late Dec. 21. “Our disturbance is that the judiciary intervenes in the actions of the executive and the legislative.”

In a statement last week, Erdoğan described the principle of the separation of power and bureaucratic oligarchy as the main obstacles to his government’s actions, especially court rulings that nixed major privatization projects.

“None of these powers – the judiciary, the legislative and the executive – can exercise power on behalf of each other. But there occurred so many things in the past that we have seen the judiciary intervene into the actions of the legislative,” he said, recalling the Constitutional Court’s annulment of a law liberating the use of headscarf.