US warns Turkey's HDP dissolution would ‘undermine democracy’

The Biden administration has condemned a Turkish effort to disband one of the country’s largest opposition parties, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). 

On Wednesday, a Turkish prosecutor filed a case with the Constitutional Court to dissolve the HDP, the parliament’s third-largest party. The indictment accuses the HDP of ties to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Kurdish militant group that both Turkey and the United States have labeled a terrorist organization.

The same day, the Turkish parliament voted to strip HDP lawmaker Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu of his seat. A court in February upheld Gergerlioglu’s 2½-year prison sentence for “spreading terrorist propaganda,” a conviction that stemmed from a 2016 social media post about the PKK. 

The State Department is monitoring the “troubling moves” in Turkey, including the parliament’s expulsion of Gergerlioglu. A statement warned that banning the HDP “would unduly subvert the will of Turkish voters, further undermine democracy  in Turkey, and deny millions of Turkish citizens their chosen representation.”