DOUBTS OVER TURKISH JUSTICE CAST SHADOW ON EU ACCESSION TALKS
By Vincent Boland

Financial Times, UK
Sept 26 2005

Nobody yet knowswhether the progressives or the reactionaries have
won thebattle over free speech that has raged in Turkey for the past
few days. One thing is clear, however: despite years of reforms,
the country’s justice system is riddled with loopholes. The result,
observers say, is arbitrary justice, which undermines people’s faith
in judges, prosecutors and police.

Although it is making changes as it seeks to join the European Union,
Turkey still endures a justice system that puts the rights of the
state above those of the individual. Recent events suggest that reforms
made last year to the fascist-era penal code, which were supposed to
make the system fairer and less punitive, are not working.

A court last week banned an academic conference that was to discuss
the mass killings of Armenians as the Ottoman empire collapsed 90
years ago. The conference went ahead at the weekend amid a heavy police
presence and demonstrations by small groups of protesters. A few weeks
earlier, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most acclaimed writer, was charged
with treason for remarks about Turkey’s denial of Armenian suffering.

The two incidents suggest how criminal justice and judicial
systems steeped in decades of nationalist ideology, reinforced by an
authoritarian constitution, can betray a reforming government’s best
intentions. They did little to enhance Turkey’s democratic credentials
a few days before it begins the formal EU accession process. The
attempt to silence the conference will have been noted in France,
which opposes Turkey’s EU membership and is home to Europe’s largest
Armenian diaspora community.

Joost Lagendijk, chairman of the Turkey delegation at the European
parliament, says the ban on the conference demonstrated the inadequacy
of the new penal code. Some legal experts claim the court in which
the judge sat had no authority to hear such a case. Turgut Tarhanli,
director of the Human Rights Law Research Center at Istanbul Bilgi
University, says the judge who ordered the ban did not allow the
organisers – two Istanbul universities – to mount a defence, a clearly
unconstitutional act.

“I hope this is an individual case that does not represent the Turkish
judicial system, but I am not so confident,” Mr Tarhanli said. “The
judicial system is a taboo in Turkey and nobody ever questions it. But
we should be asking judges whether they take the principles of the
constitution into account in their daily work.”

Others believe the constitution itself is the problem. It came into
force after a military coup in 1980. The constitution has since
been heavily revised, but the context in which it was drawn up –
when Turkey perceived herself surrounded by enemies aiming to break
up the country – appears still to influence how it is interpreted.

Guler Sabanci, head of the Sabanci Holding conglomerate and Turkey’s
leading businesswoman, says the constitution is “like an ill-fitting
suit”. “It was a suit we put on in extraordinary circumstances [after
the coup] and now it is too tight. It needs to be refitted for Turkey
in the 21st century.”

Ms Sabanci says opponents of reform can find “legal discrepancies”
that allow them to interfere almost at will, not just in the criminal
and judicial systems, or in attempting to silence historians, but in
efforts at privatisation or measures to do with the economy.

One effect of the controversy, Ms Sabanci and others say, is that
it may persuade the government to go further in strengthening free
speech provisions in the penal code and launching a wider campaign for
tolerance of dissent and controversial opinions. The prime minister,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, won praise from academics for his quick and
forthright questioning of the court decision.

But some noted that he reacted with seeming indifference when one
of his ministers scuppered the historians’ first attempt, in May,
to hold the conference, by accusing them of treason.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress