In April 2017, Hunko was part of the official PACE mission to observe the controversial Turkish constitutional referendum that criticized the referendum as an "unlevel playing field". As a reaction to critical reports Hunko and his PACE colleague Stefan Schennach from Austria made about the election process in east Turkey, he was accused by the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu to be a supporter of the PKK, which is classified as a terrorist organization by the US, NATO, and Turkey but not the UN or PACE. In a statement, Hunko rejected those accusations as a "campaign to delegitimise" his person, arguing "they wish to present my statements on the disputed vote as unreliable and distract attention from the fact that the referendum on 16 April was held under undemocratic and unfair conditions, with electoral fraud possibly even responsible for the close result".