The parliament held an initial discussion on the plan on Tuesday and, under house rules, it has to wait 48 hours before holding the main second-round debate.

Since Tuesday's session ran until late in the evening, the earliest time the parliament could have held the second debate was late Thursday.

Under orders from the prime minister, the ruling Justice and Development Party, which has a comfortable parliamentary majority, decided to re-schedule the second debate for Friday, the NTV and CNN-Turk news channels said Wednesday.

Erdogan has even cancelled a trip outside Ankara set for Friday in order to attend the session, the reports added.

In the first-round debate, Interior Minister Besir Atalay, who took the rostrum for the government, said the government initiative focussed on democratic rights, but gave no indication of the concrete steps that Ankara would take in the process.

"We believe that democratisation will resolve a terrorism problem that has ethnic nationalism at its root," Atalay told the assembly.

But he underlined that the plan would "never contain elements that would cripple our unitary structure, our unity" as opposition parties accused the government of giving into "terrorists" and undermining national unity.

Since August, the government has sought to build support for its initiative which aims to eradicate the threat of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) by giving wider rights to the country's estimated 12 million Kurds.

Media reports suggest the Kurdish peace plan may include lifting restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language, allowing the return of 12,000 Turkish Kurds currently in a camp in Iraq and investing several million dollars to tackle poverty and unemployment in the southeast.

The PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by Turkey and much of the international community, has been fighting for self-rule in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast since 1984 in a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.