Parliamentary Constitutional Commission President İyimaya: Higher judiciary of Feb. 28 adopted discourse of power, not of law

He noted that as the Constitutional Commission president he faced intense pressure to cancel the meeting, but instead of succumbing to pressure, İyimaya said they urgently convened to discuss drafting an amendment. He indicated that the opposition worked very hard to make sure that they would be the majority in the decision-making process and urgently had one of the former justice ministers who was a member of the commission come from Europe and another from İzmir.

Even though one of the former justice ministers was a deputy of the governing party, he was acting in line with the opposition due to the conditions of the time, he explained, and went on to sum up how the percentage of votes went from being equal to being against the opposition. “It was time for voting. The votes were equal. We didn’t have the minimum number of votes needed to adopt a decision. The amendment was needed as it would improve the standard of democracy. It foresaw defining the term “being the focal point of unconstitutional activity,” which was later approved by a constitutional amendment. Something unexpected happened in the voting. A member of the commission voted to approve the proposal even though he was associated with the opposition. The honor of law, democracy and science prevailed over the strong pressure of Feb. 28. That vote belonged to no one but the esteemed Professor Hikmet Sami Türk. As I had anticipated, he did what was right. A perception that could differentiate the fine ties of the politics-democracy-law triangle had manifested itself.”

Erdoğan banned from politics

İyimaya said the political establishment tried to compensate for the Feb. 28 period by changing the Constitution. He said after several months of hard work by a reconciliation commission that had been set up to draft a new constitution, a good draft had emerged. Recalling that the bill on increasing the quorum necessary for party closures was drafted during this time, İyimaya said: “The overwhelming effects of Feb. 28 were still alive deep down. Legislators of the time wanted to restore its reputation by changing the Constitution. The Feb. 28 process had lost its initial ‘protective’ abilities. However, the Supreme Court of Appeals chief public prosecutor still had an authoritarian appetite for closure cases. The chief prosecutor and the Constitutional Court president strictly opposed increasing the minimum number of votes needed to decide on a closure case from three to five members. They saw themselves as being superior to the nation.”  

Noting that once politicians started to join forces to pursue democracy the “dance of powers” by social engineers started to solidify, İyimaya said efforts to ban Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was the mayor of İstanbul at the time, from politics for life also ended up being in vain.

Some people wanted to impose a lifetime ban from politics to those who had been arrested for committing an ideological crime, he said, and explained the back story of this attempt. “At a certain point, the Reconciliation Commission was discussing Article 76, which regulates the requirements for being a deputy. There was a critical provision in this article, which no one mentioned or touched. I observed with astonishment as the Welfare Party [RP] members of the commission failed to realize this issue. Those were the days in which [Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals of the time] Vural Savaş was trying to engineer the society according to his personal political and ideological convictions. His attempts were beginning to move towards the İstanbul Metropolitan Mayor’s Office, and the operation to prevent people from advancing had been launched. They were the days in which Erdoğan’s luck changed for the better, yet the days when there were also efforts to remove him from politics,” İyimaya said, adding that “the article stipulated a lifetime election ban on those who had been convicted of committing ‘ideological crimes’ even if they were later acquitted. I took the floor and explained that this obstacle was not compatible with democratic pluralism. I explained that it also meant a lifetime ban from politics for our current prime minister. The prime minister was sentenced to four months in the Kayseri prison for reading a poem, which was considered an ideological crime under Article 76. My point of view was unanimously accepted. The term ‘ideological crimes’ was changed to ‘terror crimes’.”

Noting that the amendment was not as easily accepted in the General Assembly as it was in the commission, İyimaya explained that they faced serious problems during parliamentary sessions. He added that social engineers complained about him to the administration of the True Path Party (DYP), of which he was a member at the time. “My attempts at improving Constitution Article 76 were conveyed to the party administration as an attempt to block my own party from advancing. A closed session was held by the group for this reason. But democracy had already set sail. Intermediary efforts did not yield any results. Turkish politics had freed itself from seeing coups as a way out and not seeing the nation as mature enough to make the right decisions.