The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
How Turkey’s courts turned on Erdogan’s foes
ISTANBUL — It took 16 judges to convict Kurdish politicians Gultan Kisanak and Sebahat Tuncel of belonging to a terrorist organization last year.
Their trial in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast, was concluded in just a dozen sessions, but during that time the threejudge panel was in constant flux. The women, who maintain their innocence, were brought to court only once — to hear the "guilty" verdict.
Their lawyer, Cihan Aydin, said mounting a proper defence was all but impossible because he never knew who was going to be sitting in judgment. The judges, several of them young and inexperienced, were switched without explanation.
"The chief judge was changed four times as well," said Aydin, a human rights lawyer and chair of the local bar association. "At every hearing there was a new group of judges, and every time we had to start the defence from the beginning."
The tumult turned the proceedings on their head. "It was impossible for the judges to read the thousands of pages in the case file, so each time we had to summarize and explain what was in the indictment," Aydin said. "It became our job to teach the judges."
The court declined to comment about the case.
Terrorist charges like the ones used to convict the two women have become commonplace in Turkey, especially since a failed attempt by parts of the military to overthrow President Tayyip Erdogan in 2016. Mass arrests followed.
Also increasingly common is the practice of switching judges during a trial, more than a dozen lawyers and other legal sources told Reuters. Turkish officials say such changes are merely routine, for health or administrative reasons. Lawyers interviewed by Reuters say they are convinced it's a way for the government to exert control over the courts.
"The constant reshuffling of judges is a simple but very useful mechanism. For every time the government gets involved like this in the judiciary, there are hundreds more cases where the judges learn their lesson" not to act against perceived government interests, said Gareth Jenkins, a political analyst based in Istanbul.
Neither Erdogan's office nor the justice ministry responded to detailed questions for this article by the time of publication. Mehmet Yilmaz, deputy chairman of the Council of Judges and Prosecutors, the state body that appoints law officials, said Turkey's legal system is "not behind any country in the world."
The judiciary has been used as an instrument to advance political agendas in Turkey for decades. Under Erdogan, his opponents say, it has been deployed as a political cudgel and hollowed out to an unprecedented degree.
Under his purge, thousands of judges and prosecutors have been sacked, by the government's own count. They have been replaced by inexperienced newcomers, ill-equipped to handle the dramatic spike in workload from coup-related prosecutions. At least 45 per cent of Turkey's roughly 21,000 judges and prosecutors now have three years of experience or less, Reuters calculated from Ministry of Justice data.
"We aren't claiming that the judiciary was independent from governments before," said Zeynel Emre, a lawmaker from the main opposition Republican People's Party. "However, a period like this where the government wields the judiciary like a sword on politics and especially the opposition is unprecedented."
At the time of their arrest in late 2016, Kisanak and Tuncel were prominent figures in the Kurdish minority's decadeslong campaign for social, economic and political equality. Kisanak, 58, a former journalist, had recently been elected Diyarbakir's mayor. Tuncel, 44, was a lawmaker in parliament, representing an Istanbul constituency. They were jailed for 14 and 15 years, respectively, for spreading terrorist propaganda and belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party, which is banned in Turkey and branded a terrorist organization by the U.S. and EU. They denied the charges.
Istanbul Bar Association chairman Mehmet Durakoglu said that by using the judiciary as a tool against its opponents, Erdogan's government "has achieved what it couldn't do by political means" at the ballot box. The Turkish government counters that its legal system is as advanced as any Western country and that threats against its national security require strict anti-terrorism laws.