Turkey's constitutional reforms aimed at substantial strengthening of the powers of the president, will become dangerous step backwards for democracy. This was stated by a panel of legal experts at the Council of Europe, reports Reuters.

The statement says, that changes will give the Turkish president "the power to dissolve parliament on any grounds whatsoever, which is fundamentally alien to democratic presidential systems". The EC experts expressed a concern over the situation, which provides the new president "with unsupervised authority to appoint and dismiss ministers, and to appoint and dismiss all high officials on the basis of criteria determined by him or her alone". They consider it as weakening of "already inadequate system of judicial oversight of the executive".