TURKISH JUDICIARY ACCUSED OF POLITICAL BIAS
Thomas Seibert

The National
N/705219952/1135
May 22 2009
UAE

ISTANBUL // Highly controversial decisions by Turkey’s justice system
targeting Abdullah Gul, the president, as well as several writers and
publishers, have fanned a debate about whether secular and nationalist
forces in the judiciary of this EU candidate country are pursuing
their own political agenda.

The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, which
has roots in political Islam, said this week a recent court decision
demanding that Mr Gul stand trial in a suspected corruption case
that goes back to the past decade showed that some members of the
justice system were not concerned about the rule of law, but about
humiliating a president they do not like.

"The fact that some parts of the judiciary have been going on and
on about this issue is not being seen as well-meaning," Nihat Ergun,
minister for industry and trade and a leading member of Mr Erdogan’s
ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, told reporters in
Ankara. Mr Ergun said it was obvious the issue in question was legally
baseless. "Other aims are behind the fact that this issue is brought
up again and again."

The minister was asked to comment after a court in Sincan, a suburb of
Ankara, ruled that Mr Gul should stand trial. The court decision drew
attention not only because of its content, but because it referred
to Mr Gul not as president, but as a "suspect".

"It is a purely political thing," said Faruk Sen, a political observer
of Turkey and head of the German-Turkish Foundation for Education
and Scientific Research, a think tank in Germany. "This judge wants
to get his own back on Gul."

Turkey’s judiciary is a bastion of the country’s secular elites,
who regard the AKP as an Islamist organisation bent on destroying the
republic. Two years ago, the judiciary tried to block the election of
Mr Gul, the foreign minister of the AKP government at the time, to the
office of president by annulling a parliamentary decision. Last year,
the constitutional court came close to shutting down the AKP.

As Turkey’s constitution says that the president can only be tried for
treason while in office, even legal experts known for their critical
attitude towards the AKP said the demand by the court in Sincan was
political in nature. Ozdemir Ozok, the head of the Union of Turkish Bar
Associations, told yesterday’s Vatan newspaper the Sincan decision was
"made with the sole aim of undermining the office of the president".

Mr Gul’s office also said the president could not be tried for the
alleged corruption case.

But Sabih Kanadoglu, a former prosecutor general and a legal expert
of the hardline secularist camp, insisted that Mr Gul had to face
the courts. The constitution did not contain anything that would
protect the president from standing trial in connection with "personal
wrongdoings", Mr Kanadoglu told the Cumhuriyet newspaper. Secularist
opposition politicians also called for Mr Gul to be tried.

The president is accused of having been involved in the embezzlement
of funds while being a member of a now-defunct Islamist party in
the 1990s. Newspaper reports said the final word about whether or
not the president can be tried would probably be spoken by Turkey’s
court of appeals.

The ruling against Mr Gul followed several other controversial court
decisions in recent weeks. Most prominently, the court of appeals
this month opened the way for a civil case against Turkey’s first
Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, because of a statement the writer made
about Turkish massacres of Armenians in the First World War and about
the Kurdish question.

A criminal case against Mr Pamuk was dropped in 2006, but now one
of the highest courts in the country has ruled that a group of
nationalists can sue Mr Pamuk for damages because he said in an
interview in 2004 that "one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were
killed in Turkey". The plaintiffs had argued that their personal
rights as members of the Turkish nation had been violated by Mr
Pamuk’s statement, press reports said.

Meanwhile, Irfan Sanci, the head of the Sel Yayincilik publishing house
in Istanbul, is facing trial because three books that he published
were categorised as pornography, even though Turkish law says that
works of literature do not fall under pornography regulations.

The EU has repeatedly criticised the Turkish justice system and called
for a comprehensive reform. Eser Karakas, a professor at Istanbul’s
Bahcesehir University and a columnist for the Star newspaper, wrote
that Turkey’s judges should concentrate on their core job instead of
getting involved in political issues. He drew attention to figures
from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that say the
European court has dealt with complaints against 1,939 Turkish court
decisions so far. In 1,676 cases, the Strasbourg court ruled that the
decisions coming from Turkey contained at least one violation of the
European Convention of Human Rights. In more than 500 cases, Strasbourg
found that applicants had not received a fair trial in Turkey.

These figures showed that members of Turkey’s judiciary "flunk the
international test [in the Strasbourg court] for the most part",
Karakas wrote. Nationalist judges in Turkey often talked about politics
but never about the fact that standards of judicial decisions in
the country had failed to reach the "standard of our refrigerators
and cars".

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress