Erdogan to OSCE: First you should know your place!

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed his anger over the report published by the OSCE observer mission on the constitutional referendum, Anadolu reports. During an event at the presidential palace, Erdogan urged the OSCE to know its place.

“There is an organization called OSCE in Europe. Now they are preparing a report stating that the elections in Turkey passed in this or that way. First you should know your place! We will not consider, see or recognize your political report. We will go on our own way,” Erdogan said.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry also issued a statement over the OSCE report, considering unacceptable the report’s description that the referendum was not in accordance with international standards. On April 17 the OSCE issued a statement on Turkey’s constitutional referendum results. The statement said the referendum was contested on an unlevel playing field, and the two sides in the campaign did not have equal opportunities. “In general, the referendum did not live up to Council of Europe standards. The legal framework was inadequate for the holding of a genuinely democratic process,” Cezar Florin Preda, Head of the delegation from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, said.

“The referendum took place in a political environment in which fundamental freedoms essential to a genuinely democratic process were curtailed under the state of emergency, and the two sides did not have equal opportunities to make their case to the voters,” said Tana de Zulueta, Head of the ODIHR limited election observation mission.

“Our monitoring showed the ‘Yes’ campaign dominated the media coverage and this, along with restrictions on the media, the arrests of journalists and the closure of media outlets, reduced voters’ access to a plurality of views.”