Turkey demands end of European Union interference in referendum outcome

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Opposition parties including the main opposition CHP and the pro-Kurdish HDP had called on the electoral board to annul Sunday's vote, which was narrowly won by the "Yes" camp, because unstamped ballot papers were included.

Turkey's electoral authority rejected appeals to annul the referendum granting President Tayyip Erdogan wide new powers, but the main opposition CHP party said it will maintain its legal challenge to a vote it has said was deeply flawed. It cited precedents in which it had accepted unstamped ballots as valid due to the incompetence or lack of training of local ballot box officers who had failed to stamp them in time for elections.

The CHP, the largest opposition party in parliament, said on Wednesday it would never accept the legitimacy of the result of the referendum, raising the spectre of even withdrawing from the legislature.

Before the electoral board's announcement, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the opposition had the right to file objections, but warned that calling for street protests was unacceptable. Worldwide observers said the vote had been carried out in a political environment in which fundamental rights and freedoms had been curtailed.

Mr Yildirim said the "the path to seek rights" should be limited to legal objections and urged the opposition to accept the vote's outcome.

A prosecutor will now consider whether to press charges against Guven.

"The main opposition party not recognizing the results is not an acceptable thing", Yildirim said.

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Some 2,000 protesters in Istanbul Wednesday evening demanded the resignation of the electoral board and chanted "Don't be silent, shout out, "no" to the presidency".

Thousands have protested in Istanbul and Ankara since Sunday's referendum, which has set into motion the transformation of Turkey's system of government from a parliamentary into a presidential one.

Turkish police detained 38 people in Istanbul over peaceful street protests that took place after Sunday's referendum.

"The German government takes the report by the OSCE and the Council of Europe very seriously, and we expect Turkey to do so", government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer told reporters in Berlin. "We will follow closely how Turkey behaves on this". Observers said this decision, made in the afternoon of election day, removed an important safeguard against fraud.

Sunday's referendum endorsed by a narrow margin the largest overhaul of Turkey's political system since the founding of the republic almost a century ago, giving Erdogan sweeping authority over the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member-state.

Speaking at a news conference, Cavusoglu said U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will finalize the date according to the two presidents' schedules.

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