Erdogan rejects European court's 'non-binding' ruling over Kurdish leader
Shares
Ankara: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rejected a European Court of Human Rights' ruling that Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtas should be released, saying Turkey was not bound by the court's decisions.
Demirtas, a former co-chief of the leftist pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), has been imprisoned since November 2016 over alleged links to Kurdish militants.
"The decisions delivered by the ECHR do not bind us," Erdogan was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu news agency after a meeting of his ruling party.
"We will make our counter-attack and get this business over with," the president added, without elaborating.
The Strasbourg-based ECHR enforces the European Convention on Human Rights and is a body of the Council of Europe (CoE), of which Turkey has been a member since 1950.
