Why has Turkey locked up 3,000 judges?
Alarm at arrest of 3,000 prosecutors and judges over past three days
The Çaglayan Palace of Justice in Istanbul is normally deserted in the middle of July, when court officials take their holidays and only the most urgent cases are heard.
This week, however, staff were informed that they must return to their desks immediately to begin work on one of the biggest bureaucratic challenges the system has ever faced: processing charges against thousands of soldiers, policemen and other public officials rounded up by government forces since the botched coup last Friday.
But it’s one group of detainees whose presence on court lists that has prompted most alarm with the legal system: the 3,000 judges and prosecutors who have been arrested in the past three days.
Many are expected to be charged with belonging to a “parallel state” organisation, a reference to the claim by President Tayyip Erdogan and his government that they are aligned to the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, a one-time Erdogan ally who the president accuses of trying to place supporters within the courts, police, armed forces and military with the aim of toppling the state.
The 3,000 judges and prosecutors fall into two categories, a senior government official told The Irish Times.
First are those who “directly took part in the coup plot in the planning stages” or whose names appeared on a seized list of individuals who would be appointed to important positions if the coup succeeded.
Second are those who the government alleges were in contact with the coup organisers. “I understand that the numbers seem big, but Turkey has 81 provinces. We have 27 constitutional court seats. Consider how big that hierarchy is. Maybe for Ireland it might seem a little too much, but this is a vast bureaucracy,” the official said.
Critics are unconvinced, seeing the swift arrest of such a large number of judges and prosecutors – they were all arrested within 24 hours of the coup being thwarted – as an indication that Erdogan is using his position of strength to remove public officials who are hostile to his agenda.
The EU commissioner dealing with Turkey’s membership bid, Johannes Hahn, suggested yesterday that the list of detainees was prepared in advance, “to be used at a certain stage”.
The EU has repeatedly raised concerns about the erosion of judicial independence in Turkey in recent years. “I’m very concerned,” Hahn said. “It is exactly what we feared.”
Büçkün Canatik, an Istanbul- based human rights lawyer, sees the arrests as part of a pattern that has been evident for some time.
“For a while now, the government has been filling up the judiciary with its own supporters,” she says. “Now they have created all these vacancies which they can fill, and it’s scary.”
Canatik knows some of the judges who have been detained. She believes some were arrested simply because they were leftists or Alevis – members of Shia communities who together constitute Turkey’s largest religious minority.
“They want to change the legal system step by step, in a very systematic way,” she says of the government.
The courts have already become more loyal to Erdogan’s agenda, his opponents say, since large-scale purges in the judiciary following a corruption scandal in 2013.
Just weeks before the coup, Turkey’s parliament approved sweeping plans to restructure the higher courts, in what was seen by Erdogan’s critics as a move that would allow him to remove troublesome judges and tighten his grip over the judiciary.
Under the new law, most of the 711 judges at two of the highest courts – the council of state, which hears cases lodged by citizens against the government, and the supreme court of appeals – would be removed. There would be fewer judges, and new appointments would be carried out by the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which falls under the control of the justice ministry.
In addition, Erdogan would be able to appoint a quarter of the judges at the council of state, allowing him to stack one of the country’s most important legal bodies with his allies.
Erdogan’s government argued that its overhaul of the system was simply an attempt to reform a higher judiciary swamped by as many as two million cases, some waiting for years to be heard.
Asked how 3,000 alleged Gülenists could have escaped the last purge of suspect judges in 2013-2014, the senior government official pointed to the fact that many previously trusted public servants, including Erdogan’s chief military aide, had also been arrested this week. “Because this is a very complex and clandestine organisation, it’s very difficult sometimes to map it out. It has been a gradual process.”
Some rights groups are increasingly despondent about the situation, however.
“For a long time there has been no such thing as an independent judiciary,” says Ayse Panis of the Human Rights Association, a Turkish organisation that works with many Kurds. “The security services decide, the prosecutor gives it to the court and the judge hands down the sentence.”
Even the atmosphere within the system has changed dramatically, Canatik says. Until relatively recently, women were not allowed to enter public buildings while wearing the headscarf.
Today, one judge in Istanbul wears her headscarf in court and has Koranic verses on the wall in her office.
In another change, imams have recently been given authority to register marriages – a procedure that previously rested with the civil authorities.
At issue is not merely the erosion of secularism within the system, Canatik believes.
She also sees radically different views among the newer judges. “We’re pushing for human rights, and the recently-appointed judges are not interested in it. I expect it to get worse.”
All of this weighed on her mind this week when she was contacted by a number of soldiers who asked her to represent them at their upcoming trials on coup-related charges.
“We know they have been mistreated . . . I know if I go to the Palace of Justice I’ll end up arguing with the anti-terror police, and I’ll then be accused of being a coup supporter,” she says.
Source: The Irish Times
