A senior official of the parliament of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg said yesterday that Turkey faced suspension should the Kurdish rebel leader, Mr Abdullah Ocalan, be executed.
Lord Russell-Johnston, president of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, said that parliamentary groups would "take measures to suspend the Turkish delegation from the parliamentary assembly", if Mr Ocalan was executed.
Turkish prosecutors have demanded the death penalty for Mr Ocalan, accused of treason and separatism.
Lord Russell-Johnston, a Conservative, was addressing a press conference in advance of the parliament's summer session.
He welcomed Turkey's decision to allow European parliamentarians to attend Mr Ocalan's trial, and a decision by the Turkish parliament to name a civilian to replace a soldier as Mr Ocalan's trial judge.
The Council of Europe makes a ban on the death penalty a condition of membership. The European Court of Human Rights has twice reprimanded Turkey for lack of impartiality because of the presence of military judges in state security trials.
The court is being swamped by a soaring number of lawsuits from citizens of its 41 member-states, the court's Swiss chairman, Mr Luzius Wildhaber, said yesterday.
Mr Wildhaber said the growing caseload made it difficult for the Strasbourg court to cut lengthy delays in issuing rulings, despite a six-month-old reform which made it sit permanently instead of one week per month.
He told a news conference that the number of suits had increased by 25 per cent in the first six months of this year over the same 1998 period, after a 25 per cent increase for the whole of 1997. Turkey was the leading target, with 2,115 legal suits filed against Ankara authorities this year, far ahead of Italy with 1,472 cases, Poland with 943 and Britain with 706.
The number of cases should keep rising as several central and east European states had recently ratified the European Human Rights Convention, giving their citizens access to the court.
Mr Wildhaber said the budget of the court, which is the judicial arm of the Council of Europe human rights watchdog, was one quarter that of the European Union court in Luxembourg.
He urged all member-states to protect human rights better and use their own constitutional courts as human rights courts to prevent the Strasbourg court from being overwhelmed.
Reuters reports: Turkish security forces killed seven Kurdish rebels in weekend fighting in the south-east of the country, local authorities said yesterday.
A statement issued in the regional capital, Diyarbakir, said the clashes took place in the provinces of Mus, Sirnak and Mardin. There was no mention of any government casualties.
Elsewhere, Kurdish rebels attacked the house of a local governor late on Sunday night, wounding eight of his police guards, two of them seriously. The rebels riddled the house with rifle fire before escaping.
The governor, a central government appointee responsible for the region around the town of Kiziltepe near the Syrian border, was not injured. The police officers were being treated in local hospitals.