‘Founding institutions not enough for human rights'

They also plan to urge the government to cooperate with them to overcome the possible difficulties in running these new institutions and mechanisms. The government plans to establish a human rights institution and a commission on combating discrimination and to strengthen legal measures to combat hate crimes. The government move is to be part of the democratization initiative aiming to solve Turkey's long-standing Kurdish problem.

While addressing in Parliament, Interior Minister Beşir Atalay last week said the government will establish independent bodies to promote and ensure human rights.

As part of this, a bill seeking to establish an independent body to work to eliminate discrimination will soon be brought before Parliament.

The structure of the Prime Ministry’s Human Rights Directorate will be changed, too; it will be made independent. As a follow-up to the approval of United Nations protocols on the prevention of torture, a national mechanism will be established to implement them. Another independent body will be set up to monitor all complaints about security forces, especially as concerns violations of human rights.

All these new institutions and mechanisms are expected to give momentum to democratization but also to the demands of the European Union as part of the accession process.

‘Institutions must be autonomous’

Human Rights Association (İHD) President Öztürk Türkdoğan, citing EU calls for the reforms, said all these mechanisms could have been established 10 years ago and that Turkey had lost time. Nevertheless, he says the decisions are well intentioned, though implementing them effectively requires the full cooperation of civil society, constitutional amendments and a strong legal basis.

“If there is no constitutional basis for these institutions, the Turkish judiciary will not take them seriously,” Türkdoğan said.

Sezgin Tanrıkulu, affiliated with the Turkish Human Rights Foundation (TİHV) and a former chairman of the Diyarbakır Bar Association, said in the past mechanisms such as the Prime Ministry’s Human Rights Directorate were established but did not work effectively since they were not independent. “The ‘I did it and it happened’ is not a useful mentality. The question is, will all these mechanisms be established for the sake of human rights, or will they be established to meet EU demands -- or will they simply be a cosmetic change?” Tanrıkulu told Today’s Zaman.

He said that when the Prime Ministry’s Human Rights Directorate was first established, it created much hope, but its implementation was not successful because it did not receive strong support from civil society. Yılmaz Ensaroğlu, a human rights activist and a former chairman of the Association of Human Rights and Solidarity for Oppressed Peoples (MAZLUM-DER), shares similar concerns. He told Today’s Zaman that every attempt by Turkey to institutionalize in the human rights field was stillborn. “These institutions were established with a separate budget, without the ability to enforce anything and without the participation of civil society, so of course they did not work well under these conditions,” Ensaroğlu said.

He cites the parliamentary Human Rights Commission as a good example of this. “This committee does not have any authority to examine any bill from the human rights point of view. It accepts applications from individuals and the public but simply forwards these applications to the related bodies. It has no power itself. If these kinds of shortcomings can be overcome, then institutionalization can succeed,” he said.

Türkdoğan underlined that the structure of these bodies is very important. “They should be autonomous financially and based on civil society, universities and local administrations. Their decisions should be binding; otherwise, they will not work effectively,” Türkdoğan told Today’s Zaman.

He says that as a human rights organization, they prepared a draft law for the development of anti-discrimination mechanisms and shared it with the government, but the government has been less than eager to discuss legal matters concerning these institutions.

“We know they drafted a bill for establishment of a national institution for human rights. We urged them many times to share it with us, but the government has yet to do so. Human rights organizations have long worked in this field and are aware of all possible obstacles and practical solutions to them more than the bureaucrats who drafted those bills. This is why we want to share our experiences,” he said.

He added that the Human Rights Joint Platform (İHOP), comprising human rights groups together with other civil society institutions such as Alevi organizations, is planning to once more urge the government to cooperate.

But Tanrıkulu, Ensaroğlu and Türkdoğan also underlined that in order to have these new mechanisms work effectively, many legal changes are needed, too. “Let’s say an independent, civil society-based anti-discrimination institution was established and a student wearing a headscarf applied to it and claimed that she was discriminated against. What will the institution do? Will it say the Constitutional Court thinks the headscarf ban is a requirement of secularism?” Türkdoğan asks.

Tanrıkulu has a similar approach. According to him, if enforceable mechanisms are not established and so long as the Constitution is the same, any anti-discrimination institution will only be able to make extensive records of discriminative implementations.