The Council of Europe's Congress held an urgent debate after Erdogan arrested his main opposition leader, Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu,
Euronews reports.
The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe is preparing to send a fact-finding mission to Türkiye following what it describes as “democratic backsliding” including the widespread dismissal of elected mayors.
Although the situation came to international attention after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on 23 March 2025, the Council of Europe had already scheduled a debate last week in response to the close to 150 elected mayors many from opposition parties who have been dismissed since 2016, often replaced by government-appointed trustees.
İmamoğlu was arrested just as his party, the CHP, was voting to select him as its presidential candidate, which the Congress president, Marc Cools, described as “nothing to do with justice, and everything to do with politics.”
“We want to see an end to the removal of mayors, the dismissal of mayors and replacement by trustees. We don’t think that that’s fair or appropriate,” Bryony Rudkin, one of the Congress’s co-rapporteurs for the CoE on Türkiye, told Euronews.
She said that the issue was not legal, but a fundamentally democratic one: “We want to see a restoration, really, of democratic rights and accountability for local authorities in Turkey.”
David Eray, the other CoE co-rapporteur, described how a previous monitoring mission revealed several key issues that contradicted the European Charter of Local Self-Government, which Türkiye has signed. “The main points were the dismissing of [mayors] and replacement by trustees, which is not fitting with what we expect in a democracy,” Eray said.
