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Court rules on Turkish party
ANKARA, Turkey (CNN) -- Turkey's highest court Friday gave a popular political party with Islamic roots 15 days to prepare its defense against charges that it broke election regulations when it chose a leader who had been convicted of sedition. It is not clear what effect the ruling will have on Sunday's elections, in which the Justice and Development Party (AKP) is leading in public opinion polls. Chief prosecutor Sabih Kanadoglu petitioned the Constitutional Court to close the AKP party for alleged breaches of law governing how parties are formed and run. Kanadoglu said Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- a charismatic figure with grass-roots popularity -- is ineligible to lead a political party because of a prior criminal conviction. Erdogan spent four months in prison in 1999 after he was convicted of sedition for reading a poem that a court decided incited religious hatred. He was also accused of corruption when he served as Istanbul's mayor, but he was never convicted of any crimes related to those allegations. The AKP is viewed with extreme suspicion by Turkey's powerful army and by liberals because of its roots in political Islam, observers say. The party rejects that label, however, saying it considers itself pro-democratic. Turkey has closed a series of Islamic parties since they began rising to power in the mid-1990's. But Turkey covets membership in the European Union -- a group that has expressed concern over those closures. -- CNN Senior International Correspondent Walter Rodgers and Journalist Fatih Turkmenoglu contributed to this report.
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