Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has withdrawn thousands of lawsuits against people charged with insulting him, as a one-off gesture of goodwill.
Erdoğan has presented the petition to withdraw his lawsuits against the leaders of Turkey's opposition parties in the Parliament. The cases to be dropped have included seven lawsuits against CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, currently in appeal process, and he won 105,000 TL for moral damage.
Nearly four thousand civil and criminal cases on the bases of insulting the Turkish president will be dropped, except the cases against Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-chair of People's Democratic Party (HDP) and those, closely linked to the Fetullah Gülen terrorist organization.
Erdoğan had declared that he was going to withdraw all cases regarding the disrespectful insults made against him, at the Martyr Commemoration held in Ankara on Sunday to honor those who were wounded and fell martyr during the violence of the July 15 coup plot.
Under the Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code, it is a criminal offence to insult the president. Anyone, charged with insulting the President, may be sentenced one to four years in prison. Hundreds of people,including social media users, journalists and celebrities have been charged with insulting the Turkish president. Officials said 2,000 people were faced with such prosecution.
In a similar gesture, Erdoğan withdrew the lawsuits he had filed against the leaders of CHP and MHP for insulting him during his last election campaign as AK Party's chair, when he ensured a third consecutive term in the office in 2011,
