Turkey’s President Ahmet Necdet Sezer yesterday vetoed a government-sponsored law reducing penalties for unauthorized schools teaching the Qur’an, which would have enabled those convicted of opening and running illegal educational institutions to escape with a fine rather than a jail term of up to three years, arguing that it infringed on the secularist principles of the Muslim-majority country. It triggered accusations that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government is condoning religious fundamentalism.

Islamist activists in Turkey often run schools teaching the Qur’an, where -free from government control - they are accused of breeding religious hard-liners. Sezer, a staunch secularist who has often clashed with the government, said that the law had been returned to Parliament for reconsideration because it “is encouraging the opening of illegal educational institutions.”

The principle of secularism “is the cornerstone of the values on which the Turkish Republic is founded,” he said. “It is obvious that the country’s unity in the future will be endangered by the perverted mindsets of citizens educated in illegal separatist and religious educational institutions.”

Parliament will now review the law, and if it passes it for a second time unchanged, Sezer will have to approve it. He can, however, ask the Constitutional Court to annul the legislation. The controversial provision was introduced by the AKP as a last-minute change to a package of penal code amendments during a parliamentary debate last week. The main opposition boycotted the session and charged that the AKP has a secret Islamist agenda. Sezer’s veto also effectively halted several other amendments to the penal code aimed at addressing concerns over press freedom. The package would have scrapped provisions envisaging increased penalties for some offenses if committed via the media, such as slander, insult to the president and incitement to war against Turkey.

Turkey ’s new penal code, without the vetoed package, took effect Tuesday. Despite the misgivings of the press, the code, a key European Union demand from membership candidate Turkey, has been generally welcomed for introducing a more liberal justice system, in particular increasing penalties for human rights abuses and significantly improving the rights of women and children.

Meanwhile, jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan does not want to be retried in Turkey, where he believes he cannot be judged fairly, one of his attorneys told AFP. “My client does not want to be retried in Turkey. He does not want to be judged under the current circumstances,” said Aysel Tugluk, who met with Ocalan on Wednesday in the island prison of Imrali, where he is serving a life sentence for treason. Last month, the European court of Human Rights ruled that the Kurdish leader should be retried on grounds that his 1999 trial, in which he was sentenced to death for treason, was unfair. This sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life in 2002.