ANKARA
Turkey's Constitutional Court has rejected Tuesday appeals to scrap a controversial election threshold, which stipulates that political parties need to secure 10 percent nationally to gain representation in parliament.
The court said in a 14-2 majority decision that it had rejected the individual submissions due to a "lack of jurisdiction," meaning it did not consider having the authority to hear the cases.
The head of the Court, Hasim Kilic, did not participate in the vote.
The top court's decision comes ahead of general elections in June.
Under the current system, political parties in Turkey must have at least 10 percent of votes nationwide to gain parliamentary representation – the highest such threshold in Europe.
The International Crisis Group's Turkey director, Hugh Pope, had recently told The Anadolu Agency that lowering the threshold would encourage more people to choose candidates they actually wanted to vote for, ending the common feeling people have that their votes may be “wasted.”
“It will allow the HDP (Peoples' Democratic Party, a pro-Kurdish group) to enter party politics normally and build itself up as an institution,” he had added.
The HDP is the closest party to the 10 percent limit, as it put forward independent candidates to circumvent the threshold in the east and southeast of Turkey; these independent deputies later founded a group in parliament.
In 2007 the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that Turkey's election threshold did not violate the right to free elections and was not a violation of human rights, but it did add that it was “desirable” to lower it.
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