People's Democracy Party
People’s Democracy Party was a Kurdish political party in Turkey. It was founded the 11 May 1994 by lawyer Murat Bozlak. It has decided to distance itself clearly from the Kurdistan Workers' Party.
At the party congress in June 1996 masked men dropped the Turkish flag and raised the PKK flag. As a result of this, all HADEP members were arrested. In the electoral campaign towards the general and local elections of April 1999, it faced opposition from the Turkish authorities. The rally planned in Diyarbakır the week before the elections was prohibited and thousands of people were detained. At the time the party hoped to become an important factor in Turkish politics. But despite the oppression, the party was successful in the local elections of April 1999, an won 37 mayorships, including the one of Diyarbakır. The party survived the 1999 closure case but was banned by the Constitutional Court on 13 March 2003 on the grounds that it allegedly supported the PKK. As a result, 46 politicians from the HADEP were banned from politics for 5 years. Greece, the holder of the EU presidency at the time, issued a statement criticizing the events.
The party was succeeded by the Democratic People's Party, which was joined by 35 mayors of the former HADEP on the 26 March 2003.
In 2010, the party's dissolution was unanimously found by European Court of Human Rights to be contrary to Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
