Justice at home, justice in the world

As of yesterday the 2020-2021 Judicial Year has begun. As is customary, the opening took place at the Presidential Complex with the participation of the President, the Speaker of the Grand National Assembly and members of the high judiciary, in a ceremony at which an annual and general assessment of our situation regarding justice was made.

Among the lengthy assessments of Turkey on law and justice by the President of the Court of Cassation, esteemed Mehmet Akarca, the most striking in my view was what he said to the effect that Turkey's legal system and basic laws were formed, in line with the westernization goal of the first years of the Republic, by borrowing the laws of certain countries. According to Akarca, the accumulation of knowledge, the human resources and the legal culture now formed in our country have reached a level at which we can henceforth develop our own laws ourselves. However, justifying this importation done in the first years of the Republic by Turkey's being far from a level at which it could develop its own laws is undoubtedly a point that needs to be discussed. In truth, even in that period we had neither a scarcity of people nor a lack of cultural and legal accumulation that required us to take our laws from outside. What was done then was the result not of a necessity but of an ideological choice.

Yet the situation, both then and now, really deserves in full measure the following pithy words of the President of the Court of Cassation, esteemed Akarca:

"What befits us is not to import and consume with a facile approach, but, as in every field, with a broad open-mindedness, to produce, to set an example and to export in the field of law. As a nation we will think in keeping with our own reason, read the facts with our own eyes, identify local and global problems ourselves without being affected by any prejudice, and seek just solutions and offer them to our people and to humanity... Not only Turkey but the whole world must free its collar from postmodern colonialism."

The vision that President, esteemed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, put forward on justice went beyond this. Erdoğan, who began his words by saying that justice is in fact the foundation of everything, explained that justice is also at the basis of the struggle Turkey is waging today in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, and that when he constantly says "the world is bigger than five" what we are struggling for is justice.

In every place where we are actually on the ground, from Syria to Libya, the basic search of the work being carried out is nothing other than justice. There are blatant rights violations there, massacres, oppression that has become widely known, and where no one objects, Turkey enters the scene with only a demand for justice and struggles.

The attempt to imprison Turkey on its coasts by means of an island of 10 square kilometers, without regard to its enormous size of 780 thousand square kilometers, is without doubt the clearest expression of wrong and injustice. The struggle Turkey is waging against a world that makes this division shamelessly and recklessly, and that by doing so all but crushes down on the riches of the Mediterranean, which is the right of every country, displaying an example of modern colonialism, is nothing other than a struggle of right, law and justice.

Unfortunately there is no mechanism that holds to account some states that see themselves as great, powerful, prosperous, invincible for the oppression they display toward others. This world is being covered up through the diplomatic sophistry produced by five members who have agreed among themselves not to see each other's oppressions and wrongs. Against this, it is of course no surprise that Erdoğan, who cries out "the world is bigger than five", is seen as a spoilsport. His rebellion is for justice.

There is a distorted understanding in which democracy, security and prosperity belong only to certain societies of the world, and others matter only insofar as they serve them. Because of this understanding, democracy and prosperity are today not allowed to develop outside their own countries. Even for the war among themselves, the homelands of oppressed nations are chosen as the field.

In the view of President Erdoğan, Turkey is wanted to be made the direct target, the victim, of this injustice, this oppression. That is why Turkey voices its demand for right and justice on every platform, both on its own behalf and as the spokesman of humanity's common longing for justice.

At the opening of a judicial year, it was quite meaningful that President Erdoğan was not content with justice at home alone but put forward a vision of justice for the world. After all, justice is the most important principle from which the AK Party also takes its name. It is destined that the sensitivity toward this principle will bring Turkey to the fore today in the search for justice in the world as much as at home.