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Turkey's chief prosecutor asked the Constitutional Court in March to disband Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party and bar him and 70 other party members from joining a political party for five years.
President Abdullah Gul is also on the prosecutor's list.
The case highlights the political rift between Turkey's secularist circles - mostly active in judiciary and the military - and the ruling party, whose many members are devout Muslims with ties to the country's Islamic movement.
The ruling party and the secularist opposition were locked last year in a dispute over who should be Turkey's president, a largely symbolic post. The ruling party won that round by easily winning a quick election.
The party later attempted to lift a decades-old ban on the wearing of head scarves at universities, but the top court overturned that bill, saying it was anti-secularist. Chief prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya cites the head scarf bill as proof the government is trying to scrap secularist principles enshrined in the Constitution.
