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Judiciary crisis likely to top today’s EU-Turkey debate in Brussels
The 63rd meeting of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, also to be joined by Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin, comes only days after a row was sparked in the EU-candidate country when a Turkish court last Wednesday arrested Erzincan Chief Public Prosecutor İlhan Cihaner on charges of belonging to a group accused of plotting to overthrow Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.
The Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) subsequently said, however, that the prosecutors who had ordered the arrest had exceeded their authority and stripped them of their powers.
The government lashed out at the HSYK decision, with Ergin calling the HSYK move a “shame for democracy” and expressing the government’s intention to pass a comprehensive judicial reform to raise the country’s judicial standards.
Dutch Christian Democrat Ria Oomen-Ruijten, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey, will also participate in the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee meeting, which will be co-chaired by French Green Party member Hélène Flautre and AK Party’s Lütfi Elvan.
Ahead of today’s meeting, Baroness Sarah Ludford, a British member of the European Parliament, speaking on Samanyolu TV’s (STV) “Avrupa Masası” (European Table) program prepared by Selçuk Gültaşlı, the Brussels representative of Today’s Zaman, touched upon the issue of exposed plans to overthrow the AK Party government.
“When I hear these reports over those plans, I think that Turkey has to make constitutional and democratic reforms very urgently. These reports strengthen further the urgency and the need; Turks must have seen this need much clearer than I do,” Ludford, a liberal member who is also a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, told STV over the weekend.
Turkey’s judiciary has emerged as the chief line of defense of an establishment that sees the country’s hyper-secularist order threatened by the AK Party, which constantly says that it has no secret Islamist agenda and defines itself as a conservative-democrat party. The government says a constitutional reform is needed to curb the power of judges and prosecutors opposed to reforms required as part of the EU membership process.
Last month’s ruling by Turkey’s Constitutional Court, which overturned a law allowing military personnel to be put on trial in civilian courts, is another key item to be dealt with during the meeting in Brussels. The overturned law was hailed at the time by many as the biggest step taken by the AK Party toward creating a balanced military-civilian relationship in the EU candidate country.
“This ruling led to disappointment,” Ludford said, referring to the aforementioned ruling.
“In cases except special situations like lack of discipline and refusal to disobey orders, which would have been considered a crime in armies of all democratic countries and which would have been followed by military courts, civilian courts are expected to get engaged,” Ludford went on saying. “The military personnel can by no means have immunity. In a democratic country, two different justice systems cannot exist. The Constitutional Court’s ruling appears to be favoring the continuation of these two different justice systems. The problem stems from here,” she added.
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