The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Turkey’s main Kurdish political movement and the third-largest force in its parliament, is determined to fight a controversial bid to outlaw the party, boosted by the Constitutional Court’s provisional rejection of the charge sheet last week.

The closure case against the HDP is the culmination of a long-running crackdown on the party. Scores of senior party members, including former co-chair Selahattin Demirtas, have landed in jail, while others have lost parliamentary seats on often thinly evidenced terrorism-related charges.

The chief prosecutor of the Appeals Court launched his bid to outlaw the HDP on March 17, hours after Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, a vocal human rights campaigner, became the latest HDP deputy to be stripped of his seat. 

The prosecutor accused the HDP of separatism and collaboration with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged an armed campaign against Ankara since 1984 and is designated as a terrorist group. But the indictment — more than 600 pages long, excluding bulky appendices — appeared to have been hastily written. The first 500 pages were devoted to judicial investigations and lawsuits against HDP leaders, but some of them, it turned out, had been thrown out or resulted in acquittals. A deceased politician was on the list of party members for whom the prosecutor sought political bans.