In the introduction of the document, a perspective was presented for a system based on the rule of law, where rights and freedoms can be protected, the independence and impartiality of the judiciary can be ensured, a rational, ideal, transparent, simple process, justice can be accessed, and judicial results can be obtained in a reasonable time. It was explained that this perspective was directly related to seeing European Union membership as a strategic goal and expressing commitment to the accession process.

In the Principles and Values section, the development of a human-oriented service approach, the more effective protection and development of rights and freedoms, the improvement of the independence and impartiality of the judiciary, the strengthening of legal security, the facilitation of access to justice, the observance of the right to a trial within a reasonable time, and the increase of trust in the judiciary were discussed separately.

In order to have such a system, it was announced that an Action Plan would be prepared, annual monitoring reports would be published by the Ministry of Justice, a Judicial Reform Strategy Monitoring and Evaluation Board would be formed, and the reports would be shared with the public, while listing a total of 9 objectives, 63 targets and 256 activities.

The objectives set forth in the JRSD are ‘protection and development of rights and freedoms’, ‘improving the independence, impartiality and transparency of the judiciary’, ‘increasing the quality and quantity of human resources’, ‘increasing performance and productivity (target time)’, ‘improving the right to defend effectively’, ‘provision of justice’, ‘facilitating access to justice and increasing satisfaction with services’, ‘increasing the effectiveness of the criminal justice system’, ‘simplifying and increasing the efficiency of civil and administrative proceedings’, and ‘disseminating alternative dispute resolution methods’.

The Ministry of Justice announced the Human Rights Action Plan on March 2, 2021, claiming that it was prepared with the vision of ‘Free Individual, Strong Society: A More Democratic Turkey’. This plan covers the activities of all ministries and public institutions and organizations, as a continuation of the reform will expressed in the 11^th Development Plan and the JRSD.

It is seen that the President published a circular numbered 2021/9 and dated 04.29.2021 in the Official Gazette on April 30, 2021. With the circular, it was stated that the Human Rights Action Plan, which was prepared to cover the two-year period between 2021 and 2023, was written in a concrete way in terms of aims, targets and activities, for the Implementation Plan, short (1-3 months), medium (6 months-1 year) and it was pointed out that long (2-year) term processes were determined and the expectation was expressed for sensitive and responsible behavior in order to comply with the plan. The task of preparing the said implementation calendar was given to the Ministry of Justice.

Meanwhile, the ‘Human Rights Action Plan Monitoring and Evaluation Board’ was also established. The chairman of the board is the President. Its task is pursuance and coordination. In other words, as the chairman of the board, the President himself will work to ensure that the Action Plan is implemented effectively and transparently. There is a limited list of members for the Board, including the vice president, some ministers (Justice, Foreign Affairs, Internal Affairs, Family and Social Policies, Labor and Social Security, Treasury and Finance) and the vice president of the Legal Policy Board.

It is noteworthy that there are no civil society representatives among the members. However, when needed, the representatives of the relevant institutions can be invited to the meetings in order to consult their opinions.

The ministries named as board members will prepare a report every four months and send it to the Ministry of Justice. The ‘annual implementation report’ will be sent to the Ombudsman Institution and the Human Rights and Equality Institution of Turkey, and they will present their evaluations of the report to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and the President. The final version of this report will be announced to the public by the President himself.

In this context, what has been done under the name of reform so far? Four packages were prepared containing bag of law amendments ‘on the amendment of some laws’.

In addition to minor improvements, there are two interesting points that stand out in the contents of the packages:

It is possible to characterize the first of these as ‘return to what we gave up’. The legislator, dipping his hand into his magic bag, re-updates the past trials for reform. The best example of this is the criminal decree that rejoined us with the Criminal Procedure Codes (CMK) articles 250 and 252 after the ‘first package’. (Criminal decree is the name given to the institution where the prosecutor determines the sanction, and the judge only examines this sanction.)

While criminal and criminal procedure laws were ‘rewritten’ in 2005, the administration was content with issuing criminal decrees, and the prosecutor’s office and courts were given up on criminal decrees within the criminal procedure. With the first package of the Judicial Reform brought before us today, Articles 250 and 252 of the CMK have been rearranged, and this authority has been given to the prosecutor’s office and the criminal courts of first instance. The government is restoring the system that changed in 2005 with a ‘new’ judicial reform.

The second is that the wind blowing from Strasbourg is still effective on the political power. In individual applications that are currently being examined by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and are about to be adjudicated, legal arrangements that can be called retouching or wordplay, which can be considered as a show, are made in applications where there is a signal that a violation decision will be made against Turkey. It is as if, in a sense, the message ‘we saw the problem, we are fixing it’ is given to the Strasbourg-based Court.

Under the name of reform, will we be able to go beyond ‘repeating ourselves’ and returning in the same vicious circle? We are not sure.

For now, the reform only became visible as packages or bag laws. Because at the same time, violations of rights and systematic attacks on rights defenders continue.

With the judicial reform process, three packages have come to the Parliament so far and they have been accepted.

Package 1: Law No. 7188, superior time for detention in investigation, rapid trial, simple trial

Package 2: Law No. 7242 dated 04/14/2020, criminal execution regime change

Package 3: Law No. 7251 dated 07/22/2020, Amendment to the Code of Civil Procedure

On Tuesday, June 6, Package 4 was sent to the Turkish Parliament.

You can reach the 2^nd part of the news, ‘Judicial Reform Strategy Document Process: Content of the Fourth Package’ here, and the 3rd chapter, ‘Judicial Reform Strategy Document Process: Reflections on the Proposal…’ here.

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‘The Government Must Implement these Concepts to be Seen as Sincere’

Hülya Gülbahar of Equality Watch Women’s Group underlined that the action plan is not in keeping with the day to day government policies. Commenting on the action plan’s articles on violence against women, Hülya Gülbahar stated that the emphasis on Law no. 6284 was important, but actually it is the government itself which has virtually made the law inapplicable. Indicating that there is no need to pass a specific law to provide lawyers for women suffering from violence, Gülbahar stated, “This promise is not realistic, given the fact that currently, women’s organizations’ demand to participate in legal cases, even femicides, is rejected.” 

‘The Government Should Accept its Errors’

President of the Rights Initiative Association, Mehmet Arif Koçer indicated that the judiciary system must be freed from political pressure, and added, “The judiciary must truly be freed from the influence of the executive branch. The judiciary should no longer be used as an instrument to take revenge on political opponents, the government should stop making declarations on legal cases, and a general amnesty should be issued for all prisoners and convicts. These would be the first steps towards social harmony.” 

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For the sake of their own survival, politicians generate and sustain a political crisis, which in turn triggers a social crisis with severe economic and moral impact on the entire society, as well as a human rights crisis dealing heavy blows to civil society actors.

Judging by the current state of Turkish politics and civil society, one can say that the month of March truly lived up to its reputation this year. The month began with a warm breeze as the government heralded a new reform package, leaving us wondering, ‘Is the spring really about to arrive?’ Yet soon these soft winds ceded their place to political thunder clouds and storms, as the civil society found itself caught between spring and winter, and the country was rocked by turbulence true to this month’s reputation. 

Let us remind ourselves of what happened, although it might be quite difficult to forget for those who experienced it: The Court of Cassation upheld the prison sentence of 2 years, 6 months for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) MP Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu -representing Kocaeli province- who had been waging the most ardent struggle for human rights at the parliament. The district court had handed down this sentence to Gergerlioğlu for retweeting a news story. Some of the phrases and images used in the said news story were presented by the prosecutor as “propaganda for a terror organization”, and the MP was handed down a prison verdict. An analysis of the posts which had previously brought about Gergerlioğlu’s dismissal from his post as a physician at a public hospital and these more recent posts which resulted in the aforementioned sentence clearly shows that Gergerlioğlu stands against violence, and for peace. However, the prosecutor’s office and the court did not hesitate to level the accusation of terror propaganda against Gergerlioğlu, who used to be the president of a human rights organization belonging to the same broad political tradition with AKP, in a striking example of how judiciary institutions have steered far, far away from normality, in their attempt to assume the correct political position. 

In early March, Gergerlioğlu filed a Constitutional Court challenge to the verdict. Due to his qualities mentioned above and the fact that he indiscriminately stood against all human rights violations as an MP, Gergerlioğlu enjoys ample support from different sectors of society. As such, the verdict against him created a huge public uproar. Whatever their opinion concerning Gergerlioğlu’s rights advocacy work might be, all those who can make an impartial assessment about him agree that the judicial proceedings against him were unfair. Most importantly, although the Constitution stipulates that judicial proceedings against an MP ought to be postponed, that was not what happened in Gergerlioğlu’s case.

The prison sentence against Gergerlioğlu, after being upheld by The Court of Cassation, was sent to the Turkish parliament on March 13. All calls made to the speaker of the parliament by civil society actors, political parties and the society at large fell on deaf ears, as the verdict against Gergerlioğlu was read out at the parliament on March 17 and he was officially stripped of his seat. To many observers, the scene was reminiscent of the Kurdish parliamentarians stripped of their MP status in March 1994, and of Merve Kavakçı who was expelled from the parliament as other MPs shouted, “Get Out! Get Out!”. 

As such, although March began with promises of a Human Rights Action Plan, a severe winter storm had gathered already by the middle of the month. Hours after Gergerlioğlu was stripped of his parliamentary seat, the Chief Public Prosecutor for the Court of Cassation, Bekir Şahin announced that he filed a case with the Constitutional Court to ban HDP. The indictment, apparently drafted with haste, requested a political ban for 687 HDP politicians including some who had passed away, as well as the confiscation of the party’s assets.

In the wake of these developments, in the morning of March 19, the police detained Öztürk Türkdoğan, Co-Chair of the Human Rights Association (İHD) -one of Turkey’s most prominent and active human rights organizations. Türkdoğan was also a member of the so-called wise persons group during the Peace Process that lasted between 2013 and 15.

Crisis leading to more crisis

Armed clashes erupting in the Kurdish provinces in the summer of 2015 had resulted in a steep increase in human rights violations. The coup attempt of the summer of 2016 and the state of emergency declared in its aftermath expanded this human rights crisis across the country. Turkey has been going through a severe human rights crisis ever since. This crisis is at times worsened by new legislation restricting civil society’s leeway and creating a very precarious situation for civil society actors and seems to be alleviated at other times with various human rights reform packages – right before taking a turn for the worse owing to developments such as those summarized above. 

This crisis engulfing civil society in fact reflects the crisis of politics. The political crisis began with the Gezi Park protests, worsened with the failure of the Peace Process, and laid deep roots in the wake of the coup attempt and the ensuing state of emergency. After each modest step suggesting a return to the normal, the political crisis in fact became more and more entrenched. For the sake of their own survival, politicians generate and sustain this political crisis, which, in turn, triggers a social crisis with severe economic and moral impact on the entire society, as well as a human rights crisis dealing heavy blows to civil society actors. That is, although the government wants spring for itself in March, it seems unwilling to let others leave the dead of winter. Its inability to improve the economic situation creates immense pressure on the government, which in turn prompts it to further dominate and restrict the field of civil society. 

It seems that large swathes of the society, as well as many civil society actors, consider that the only exit from this crisis is to make sure that the opposition bloc participates in the elections without losing its “unity and cohesion”. However, the current weakness of civil society actors is not only a result of developments involving the government and civil society, since the opposition’s failure to provide strong support to civil society actors has had an undeniable effect as well. The opposition is reluctant to push back the restrictions imposed by the government as regards the Kurdish question, seems to lack a broad and long-term political perspective, and encroaches upon the field of civil society instead of increasing the latter’s freedom of maneuver; all of which give us a clear idea about the risks that the forces of social opposition and civil society may face if they were to let their guard down. 

To conclude, the phrase “March many weathers” has turned out to be very accurate this year. However, when no light is visible at the end of the tunnel, civil society actors must have the ambition and resolve to themselves embody that light at the end of the tunnel. As such, it would be fitting to end this article with a verse from Âşık Daimi’s famous folk ballad: Come what may, the end of winter ushers in the spring!

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