People’s Democracy Party (Turkish: Halkın Demokrasi Partisi, HADEP) was a Kurdish nationalist[1][2] political party in Turkey. It was founded in May 1994 by lawyer Murat Bozlak. The party adopted a moderate course and kept its distance from the issue of the PKK.
At the party congress in June 1996 masked men dropped the Turkish flag and raised the PKK flag instead. As a result of this incident, all HADEP members were arrested.[3] The party survived the 1999 closure case but was banned by the Constitutional Court on 13 March 2003 on the grounds that it supported the PKK.[4]
It was succeeded by the Democratic People's Party (DEHAP).
In 2010, party's dissolution was unanimously found by European Court of Human Rights to be contrary to Article 11 (freedom of association) of the European Convention on Human Rights.[5]
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