The High Judiciary Party

The HSYK's removal of the chief prosecutor and three other prosecutors of an ongoing case all at once from their authority because it did not like the course of the case (though it has no such power) shows, from whichever side you look at it, that the judicial power in Turkey is paralyzed.

That members of the Court of Cassation and the Council of State openly backed this act of the HSYK, which it carried out without authority, as if smuggling goods out of a fire, and every detail of which is a complete legal scandal, shows that every element of the dignity required by their position has entirely dissolved. The high-judiciary consensus formed around this act presents a picture in which the high judiciary no longer hesitates at all to behave like a political party.

It is no coincidence that one end of the Ergenekon case, which involves investigating dark murders and actions spread over more than half a century of Turkey's time, has reached the judiciary. In Turkey, with three and a half full-fledged coups and countless attempts at military tutelage, millions of violations of law were committed during each of them, and a perception of a normal order built upon all these violations could only have been created by obtaining the approval or acknowledgment of the law. That none of this was subjected to any judicial record or oversight sufficiently gives away the judiciary's position in this process.

Can those who complain today of the judiciary being put under pressure explain what the law, which until now has not been under pressure, has done? Were all these coups carried out in times when the law was not under pressure and was doing its own work in comfort? Was the law left at ease, and were coups prevented until now? Was the law left at ease, and were the 17 thousand unsolved murders pursued?

Really, what use is the judicial power in Turkey? If it does not secure justice, if it lets the murderers profit from their murders... If our high judiciary removes judges who go after murder, is it perhaps aware that it has in fact taken upon itself the responsibility for all the crimes that have remained unsolved until now?

The truth of the matter is that the law really has to be under some pressure. It has to be under the pressure of the nation. It has to feel serious pressure to do its own work properly. It is a maddening problem that a legal system that does not do its own work properly, that cannot catch and try the killers, that cannot find and try the forces behind the murders of Abdi İpekçi, Uğur Mumcu, Muammer Aksoy, Bahriye Üçok, Hrant Dink and the Taksim, Kahramanmaraş and Sivas massacres, should on top of that feel no pressure at all. How much more independence, how much more freedom does the law need in order to secure justice?

A legal system that can easily give decisions "in the name of the Turkish nation" has, first of all, a heavy debt to repair this nation's sense of justice, which is wounded on every occasion. To feel the weight and pressure of this debt is not abnormal but an utterly normal situation.

Yet it seems that the high judges, so eager to consider themselves independent of everyone and everything, regard this power they took over from the nation as a trust as their own property, and think they can dispose of this property as they wish. This is the open bankruptcy of the judicial system. That the HSYK, the Court of Cassation and the Council of State, together, have tried to replace the prosecutor of an ongoing case so openly already shows that they have become indifferent even to the appearances in the court order that they consider their property.

This is a state of panic, and this panic has shown with complete clarity how urgently a legal reform is needed. From this hour on, there is a serious judicial vacuum in Turkey. Turkey cannot carry on any longer with a judicial reality that can take decisions but whose decisions give nothing but harm to the sense of justice.

Meanwhile, alongside a bankrupt high judiciary system, we must not forget the existence in Turkey of a segment of the judiciary that gives hope. This scissors between the high judiciary and the judiciary actually working in the courts is another mirror of Turkey's process of change. We must not forget the existence of judges who can make sound judgments based on their own conscience, regardless of the possibility that what happened to Şemdinli Prosecutor Ferhat Sarıkaya may also happen to them. Against the bankrupt judiciary, the existence of our potential of very strong jurists is also a real source of consolation for the social sense of justice.