Tunnelling into the law and smuggling a man out of prison

The picture of the corruption of the legal system in Turkey is that people have come to adopt hiring a judge as a more effective path than hiring a lawyer to defend their rights or to obtain a gain through legal channels.

That hiring a judge has become widespread and easily accessible to the point of becoming more effective and more result-yielding in fact means that the law has no value left whatsoever.

What we call the rule of law of course does not mean that judges or magistrates can use an authority they have obtained without limit. A judge beginning to regard his decision-making power as a tool, a weapon, that he can use in his hands as he wishes is a complete perversion, and the occasional emergence of this perversion can be seen as a pathological condition.

Yet the rule of law means not the supremacy of the jurist but, on the contrary, the supremacy of the ideal of law, the primary condition of which is that legal procedures be transparent, open to all, and their results easily foreseeable.

This requires that, whoever the judge of the cases may be, the outcomes be easily foreseeable even by non-lawyers according to the state of the evidence and claims in the case.

The opposite situation is that results change according to who the judge hearing the cases is or who is the subject of the judicial proceedings, or even that the decision in the case is determined not even by the judges but by instructions given to them from another center.

In this case, judicial decisions can be easily predicted either by the identity of those who are judging or of those being judged, with no regard whatsoever to the state of the file of the defendants, and here predictability has none of the positive value it could have under normal conditions.

Another possibility is that, because instructions are given from outside rather than according to the state of the file, the uncertainty over the outcomes entirely exhausts the rule of law.

The Turkish judiciary has long had such a defect. But it must be admitted that the de facto situations created by the parallel judiciary have increased the chaotic state and uncertainty in the judiciary to the maximum degree. People's conviction that arranging a judge belonging to the parallel structure, rather than a lawyer, is more decisive in obtaining the desired outcome from the judiciary has gradually turned into a big secret, spread by word of mouth, that everybody knows. When one dwells on it a little, it is seen much better, with examples emerging every day, that this approach had covered the entire judiciary like gangrene. Paying the necessary fees to the himmet mill, and submission to the Hizmet network, had become the most important factor operating the judicial mechanism. In fact, owing to its extensions in the media and the police organization, the necessary evidence or perceptions in the judiciary could, when needed, be skillfully deployed to ease the judges' hands. How this mechanism worked in cases such as Haşiye and Selam-Tevhid could be revealed by the victims of the frame-up themselves. That the law had been slaughtered in this way would most likely not have been easily noticed were it not for the events of February 7 and December 17-25. But divine justice will surely confound the murderers and will not leave the victim's cry unanswered. While the insatiable lust for power of those who commit the slaughter of the law drives them to demand more, it also leads them to make great mistakes.

December 17 caused the corpse of the law, slaughtered and buried just beneath the surface, to come out into the open. From that moment everyone began to witness the murder that had been committed. What came afterward is a state of defiant, insolent recklessness, in which the serial killer, who until now had gained a place in society by playing the role of a good person, no longer tries to hide anything, in all his wickedness.

The parallel judiciary's attempt, in a complete kamikaze attack, to smuggle its friends out of prison is also an expression of the fact that, for them too, nothing is left to hide. There is almost no difference between trying to dig a tunnel and get one's friends out of prison and the operations carried out by this route.

Add to that the assessment of an attempt made in cooperation with an official on duty in the prison. Whatever the outcome is when caught, the fate of those who give themselves away during this operation is the same.

The judges, who were charged with establishing justice in the judiciary, used their duty powers, instead of establishing justice, to look after their organization friends inside, again in line with the instructions they received from the organization, and, when necessary, to storm even into places where they had no duty in order to smuggle them out. Frankly, the simplicity of the incident makes it unnecessary even to approach the subject from a more intricate matter such as the rule of law.