Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday called on political parties to create the necessary constitutional regulations to protect the legal framework surrounding women's freedom to wear headscarves.
Erdoğan said; "Let's provide the solution at the level of the Constitution, not the law. Today, the headscarf issue is no longer on Turkey's agenda, thanks to our struggle and the arrangements we made.
"The issue of dress in general and the headscarf, in particular, is a natural right that should not be the subject of either the law or the Constitution.
“Let's reissue the constitutional amendment proposal numbered 5735, which we prepared as the AK Party and MHP in 2008, including working in the public sector, with the clear condition that the opposite regulation cannot be made and implemented in this regard.”
Turkish headscarf-wearing women have long struggled under laws that prevented them from wearing headscarves at schools as students and in public institutions as professionals, despite the prevalence of headscarf-wearing women in the country.
The headscarf ban in Turkey was first implemented widely in the 1980s but became stricter after 1997 when the military forced the conservative government to resign in an incident later dubbed the Feb. 28 "postmodern coup."
It was gradually lifted for students in universities after 2010, while the ban for public employees was lifted in 2013 and the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) changed the regulation on June 1, 2015, allowing female judges wearing headscarves to conduct hearings.
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