Is the Constitutional Court aware of what it is doing?

The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Turkey has put its signature to an interesting and controversial decision by halting the practice Turkey had earlier initiated concerning the blocking of access to Twitter.

What makes the decision controversial, first of all, is that the application made to the AYM had not exhausted domestic remedies.

Exhausted, what a word! Not even one of them had been applied to. That is, the applicants applied directly to the AYM instead of the courts of first instance, and the Court, paying no attention to this procedural error, did not turn away these individuals who had gone to the trouble of coming all the way here, and gave the decision they wanted within a few days.

Yet Article 148 of the Constitution, which describes the AYM's limits, makes it a condition for individual application that ordinary legal remedies have been exhausted.

When there are a host of applications concerning direct and genuine individual rights violations waiting on the AYM's docket, its deciding in haste an issue that is none of its business brings the chronic problem of "arbitrariness" in our legal system before us once again.

Arbitrariness is judges, instead of observing the limits granted to them, expanding their own legal limits through faits accomplis and handing down decisions in unforeseeable ways.

Procedure takes precedence over substance. The fact that the decision given by the AYM, which can arbitrarily produce for itself an exemption from observing procedure, has political support should not cover up this legal disaster. Moreover, why it has such support in the matter of Twitter is also debatable.

The Twitter company recognizes the laws and sensitivities of American and European countries, keeps representative offices there and pays its taxes there. By contrast, it does not even respond to an application backed by court decisions concerning crimes committed via Twitter in Turkey that have caused direct victimization of many individuals. It does not keep even a representative to be addressed on such problems in Turkey, and although it carries out commercial activity, it pays no tax to Turkey.

As we have said before, the decision Turkey took on Twitter is in fact aimed at nothing other than simply protecting its own citizens and raising the standing of its own citizens in the world.

On this matter, a certain negotiation with the Twitter company had been initiated because of this process and this practice, and a certain stage had been reached. Right at this moment the AYM, by stepping in on a matter that the Constitution does not assign to it, gave a decision that weakens Turkey's hand in a negotiation being conducted with a US commercial entity on a matter in which we are entirely in the right.

Will the AYM, with this decision, really be able from now on to protect TC citizens against the victimizations that may arise through Twitter? Of course not.

Neither the AYM nor any international legal body has such a possibility. In fact, the only thing that can be relied on in this situation is politics, and the AYM, by giving not a legal decision but a political one, has tripped up the politics that is trying to protect TC citizens against foreign capital. Moreover, in doing so, by appearing to protect its own citizens rather than that company, at best it has plunged into a matter it knows nothing about and watered down a finished stew.

Indeed, where legal attention to the incident is due, according to its own job description, even if we skip the other conditions, for it to accept even one application, the individual applicants must be directly affected by the incident and be victims. Yet everyone knows that the individuals who applied for Twitter can easily get onto Twitter too via a VPN if they wish. Moreover, if what is at issue is the restriction of freedom of expression, Twitter is not the only medium in which people can express themselves. Here the only party who may be a victim is the Twitter company itself. And Turkey's demand is not for it to be shut down entirely, but for it to recognize the law of the TC and its citizens and respect their individual rights.

With so clear a dispute at hand, every TC citizen who knows himself would have been expected to show this sensitivity and support the reaction the government put forward. Yet with this decision, which it gave exceeding even its own authority, the AYM has opened the way for foreign companies to trample the law of TC citizens.

That being the case, it is impossible not to be astonished at those who greeted the AYM decision as a great victory. To be this delighted by a decision that is plainly against Turkey, its government and its citizens truly points to a serious health problem.

Does it not strike you too as odd that an international commercial company that insolently insists on not recognizing the country's law, its state, its individual rights should have so many volunteers in Turkey, and not volunteers, but militants, as it were, lawyers? What kind of zeal for a cause is this, my Lord?

In fact, 30 March must have been wake-up call enough about how far social media is from reflecting Turkey, how disconnected that world is from the real world.

If they did not wake up to that either, we had better just say "sweet dreams" and mind our own business.