In the matter at hand, the six HDP candidates had not been the subject of any final criminal conviction – according to the information available to the rapporteurs, one of the six mayoral candidates had been criminally convicted in the first instance but the appeal was pending at the court at the time of the local elections – but had (along with many thousands of other individuals) instead been prohibited by decree law from being employed in a public service. On one reading of Article 76 of the Constitution this could be considered sufficient to establish ineligibility. However, during the meetings held by the rapporteurs in Ankara all relevant interlocutors – including SEC representatives – consistently indicated that the terms “banned from public service” in the meaning of the above ineligibility provisions presupposed an individual criminal conviction and an individual decision by a court and could not be interpreted as extending to individuals listed, alongside many others, in a government decree and barred from public office by generalised assertions alone. For that reason, on 28 May 2018 the SEC had unanimously rejected objections against several candidates for parliamentary elections who had equally been prohibited from being employed in a public service by emergency decree law, due to terrorism-related charges. Subsequently 10 such candidates have been elected and are currently deputies in the National Parliament.