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Turkey will temporarily suspend the European Convention on Human Rights

Jul 21, 2016, 17:05 IST

People wave flags and hold a portrait of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan outside the AK Party headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey November 1, 2015.Osman Orsal/Reuters

Turkey will temporarily suspend the European Convention on Human rights as it implements a three-month state of emergency, the country's deputy prime minister said.

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The emergency state was implemented following a failed coup last weekend during which over 250 were killed.

Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Thursday that the state of emergency could end before the three months are up and may only last for one to one and a half month, according to broadcaster NTV and Reuters.

Turkey will follow in the footsteps of France, which also opted out of some of the convention's aspects during an emergency state implemented in November 2015 after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people.

President Tayyip Erdogan said the state of emergency, which he announced on Wednesday, would enable the authorities to act more efficiently to bring those responsible to justice.

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Turkey tried to assure its citizens and the outside world on Thursday that there will be no return to the deep repression of the past, even though Erdogan has imposed the first nationwide state of emergency since the 1980s.

With Erdogan cracking down on thousands of people in the judiciary, education, military and civil service after last weekend's failed coup, a lawmaker from the main opposition party warned that the state of emergency created "a way of ruling that paves the way for abuse".

For some Turks, the move raised fears of a return to the days of martial law after a 1980 military coup, or the height of a Kurdish insurgency in the 1990s when much of the largely Kurdish southeast was under a state of emergency declared by the previous government.

Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek - who previously worked on Wall Street and is seen as one of the most investor-friendly politicians in the ruling AK Party - took to television and Twitter in an attempt to calm nervous financial markets and dispel comparisons with the past.

"The state of emergency in Turkey won't include restrictions on movement, gatherings and free press etc. It isn't martial law of 1990s," he wrote on Twitter. "I'm confident Turkey will come out of this with much stronger democracy, better functioning market economy & enhanced investment climate."

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