Law has not Become the Solution but the Source of Environmental Problems

According to the "The Legal Transformation of 2020 in Parallel with Ecological, Economic and Political Crises" issued by the Association for Rights and Research, law in Turkey has become the source rather than solution to many problems including environmental ones, as the state has turned into a market actor, citizenship has been redefined, and principles of private law have tended to replace public law due to various legislative changes.

The report titled “The Legal Transformation of 2020 in Parallel with Ecological, Economic and Political Crises” published by the Association for Rights and Research discusses the legal amendments of the year 2020, from the perspective of public sector executives, rights advocates and associations. The study states that the state’s influence and power in the market economy have increased gradually over the past decade, particularly due to various judiciary rulings and the increased recourse to administrative decisions rather than legal regulations to oversee the energy industry. The report emphasizes that the piece of legislation known as “Article 45” among the general public allows the government to exempt coal-fired power plants from environmental protection rules by issuing regulations, thus granting public administrators the opportunity to set standards in an arbitrary manner.

The report argues that it has become impossible to legally determine which coal-fired power plant abides by environmental standards and which does not; since it is not known which standard is applied to which firm it becomes impossible to take measures to protect the environment and human health; and that this leads to unfair competition among companies, with certain firms enjoying various privileges and exemptions.

The author of the report, lawyer Fevzi Özlüer indicates that, despite the aggravation of problems associated with climate change, legal regulations for determining and measuring pollution have numerous loopholes, thus rendering the debate around climate change legislation meaningless.

Özlüer suggests that Ministry of Environment and Urbanization does not have the capability nor capacity to create a market to resolve the problem of climate change, the political crisis leads to unsustainable exemptions and privileges, and therefore the government postpones processes such as the Paris Agreement which could create the free market conditions demanded by civil society and corporations. Özlüer adds that “determining the sources of pollution and adopting the necessary measures are necessary for identifying the ensuing costs and establishing public order and safety.”

Exceptional Legal Order and its Devastation of the Environment 

The report states that the violation of constitutional rules has led to an exceptional legal order, explaining how this brings about an aggravation of environmental problems, with references to legal amendments.

One of the most noteworthy claims in the report is that the government continuously uses law and order argument as a pretext, excludes the legislative branch from the process to a large extent, limits the scope of rights through administrative decisions and practices, and focuses only on growth strategy and political stability, thus creating an “exceptional legal order”. In such an order, the legislative branch ceases to be the representative of the nation, the judiciary branch does not oversee but rather approves of government actions, and growth-centered strategies are implemented without any control mechanisms.

The report also states that the government has a monopolistic approach to the problem of climate change, manages it through the involvement of only a few ministries and investors, and blocks participatory mechanisms, and as a result, comes to view environmental organizations and associations as a “security problem”. Furthermore, it criminalizes the demands for the amendment of the Law on Associations and Law on Attorneyship as well as requests for a more participatory policy on climate change.