Turkey’s largest opposition party has appealed to the country’s Constitutional Court to overturn a controversial law that paves the way for the mass killing of stray dogs.

The law violates animal rights and international treaties, Republican People’s Party (CHP) MP Gokhan Gunaidin wrote in X.

The CHP, which won the most municipalities in the country in local elections in March, had earlier said it would not implement the law.

At the end of July, despite mass protests, the Turkish parliament passed the law allowing the killing of stray dogs in certain cases.

The changes it makes to an existing animal rights law give municipalities the power to round up stray dogs and lock them up in animal shelters for adoption or other measures, including killing.

The changes allow the euthanasia of dogs deemed by vets to be sick or aggressive or deemed to pose a “risk to human and animal health”. That will be decided by the vets.

Municipal authorities are now obliged to arrest stray dogs and lock them up in animal shelters. If possible, the dogs will get new owners and a new home.

Animal rights activists, however, fear that the majority of these animals will be killed, citing the inadequacy and lack of regulation of animal shelters in Turkey.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government justifies the measure, including by arguing that stray dogs repeatedly attack people.

According to the government, there are an estimated 4 million stray dogs in Turkey, but only around 100,000 places in animal shelters.

Some municipalities have already started to collect the dogs from the streets, Haydar Özkan of the animal rights group Haykonfed told the German Agency.

Last week, the discovery by Haykonfed and other organizations of the buried corpses of 12 dogs in Ankara sparked a debate.

Authorities in Ankara’s Altindag district said the animals died of natural causes. However, animal rights activists suspect that the dogs were poisoned and are investigating the incident.