In May 2016, Turkey’s parliament passed a constitutional amendment revoking the judicial immunity of current lawmakers. The move was believed to target Kurdish deputies, and indeed many members of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), including both of its co-chairs, have since landed behind bars on terror-related charges. On June 14, however, an Istanbul court took the unprecedented step of jailing a prominent lawmaker from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) on controversial charges that he had leaked footage of weapons-laden trucks operated by Turkey’s intelligence agency that were allegedly destined for armed groups in Syria.
The ruling against Enis Berberoglu sparked fears that the CHP — Turkey’s oldest party and legacy of the country’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — is next in line in Ankara’s crackdown on dissent, which has greatly intensified since the botched coup last year. Did CHP deputies expect that the abolition of immunities, which some party members had backed, would one day turn against them? Al-Monitor posed the question to several CHP lawmakers ahead of an emergency party meeting after Berberoglu’s conviction. All said they had never imagined such a prospect. The party seemed to be in shock.
