Wednesday, 30 March 2022.
The Union of Cyprus Turkish Bar Associations has issued a statement criticising the government’s move to postpone local elections until November, Kibris Postasi reported.
The statement said that bringing a draft law to postpone local elections was unconstitutional. There has been a great deal of criticism about the government’s attempt to halve the number of municipalities. While agreeing that reforms in local government were long overdue, critics have said that merely cutting the number of local councils was not the answer. The government’s response was to scrap the draft law to reduce the number of local councils and bring a draft law before the Assembly to enable the postponement of the local elections.
The Union of Cyprus Turkish Bar Associations said that they had noted with concern, that the unconstitutional and illegal actions and practices made by the executive and legislative organs were starting to become a habit. This attitude of the highest powers of the state, which has to be bound by the law it makes, seriously undermines the principle of the rule of law, the statement said.
“The fact that the law in general, and the constitutional rules, which are called social contracts in particular and which are more difficult to change than the laws, are violated so easily and this can be easily expressed by the members of the government from the rostrum of the Assembly; reveals that we have come to a point where society is governed not by law but by arbitrary decisions”, the Bar Association statement said.
The lawyers’ statement pointed out that everyone had to obey the rule of law.
“Just as a citizen or a foreigner in the country is obliged to act in accordance with the rules in the legislation; elected persons cannot pass laws that violate the Constitution, they cannot take unlawful decisions, they cannot act”.
The Bar Association argued that one day, unconstitutionally taken decisions would come back to haunt those who had made them, as members of society.
“It is unacceptable to inflict another wound on our legal system, which has been constantly attacked, instead of putting the solution proposals into practice in order to get rid of the economic and social depression in the country and to prevent ever-deepening impoverishment“, the statement concluded.