By Ece Toksabay
ANKARA, Feb 18 (Reuters) – A Turkish parliamentary commission was set to vote on Wednesday on a report envisaging legal reforms alongside the militant Kurdistan Workers Party’s (PKK) disarmament, advancing a peace process meant to end more than 40 years of conflict.
The PKK – designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and European Union – halted decades of attacks last year and said it would disarm and disband, calling on Ankara to take steps to let its members participate in politics.
A draft of the roughly 60-page report, shared with reporters ahead of the vote in Ankara, proposes legal reforms in parallel with the PKK laying down arms, urging the judiciary to review legislation and comply with European Court of Human Rights and Constitutional Court rulings.
A vote to back the report would shift the peace process to the legislative theatre, as President Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s leader of more than two decades, bids to end violence that has sown deep discord at home and spread across borders into Iraq and Syria.
The commission was formed in August 2025 to support a potential new phase in efforts to end the conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people and stymied economic development in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast.
The PKK’s insurgency since 1984 originally sought an independent state in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, but shifted in recent years to seeking greater Kurdish rights and limited autonomy.
The conflict has killed more than 40,000 people, mostly militants, while the NATO-member Turkish military drove the PKK base deep into mountainous northern Iraq.
The PKK has symbolically burned some weapons and announced it was withdrawing any remaining fighters from Turkey as a first step towards their legal reintegration into society, heeding a call from the movement’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan.
(Reporting by Ece Toksabay; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Philippa Fletcher)
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