The Turkish Constitutional Court protects human rights

In early 2014, a truck heading to Syria was stopped in Hatay province but when the investigator wanted to search, the gendarmerie did not allow it, and things were pretty crazy.

An Azerbaijani journalist, one of the FETÖ’s disciples in Istanbul, was deported for tweeting about the incident, and a politician, who was in the opposition party and then joined the ruling party and was given the Deputy Prime Minister’s seat, said: "I swear those cars were carrying weapons to jihadists in Syria." Several newspapers, including Aydınlık, which is now shielding the government, published a report on the matter.

After a while, the Deputy Prime Minister, who swore to God, and the Aydınlık newspaper were left aside, and the Cumhuriyet newspaper, which published a report on "the trucks of intelligence", became the government's target.

At the president's behest, the newspaper's editor-in-chief and head of the Ankara bureau were arrested and released 92 days later. The editor-in-chief, who was subjected to the assassination threat, was forced to flee to Germany, and the head of the Ankara bureau was elected mayor of Istanbul's Adalar district in the elections of March 31, 2019.

However, despite the fact that the editor-in-chief of the opposition newspaper fled to Europe, the government did not forget the "the trucks of intelligence" and Enis Berberoğlu, the former editor-in-chief of Hürriyet and an Istanbul MP ​​from the main opposition party in 2015, was turned to the prosecutor's office. Berberoğlu’s guilt was that he passed the report on "the trucks of intelligence" to another newspaper.

Berberoğlu, whose deputy immunity was revoked, was arrested. He was in prison in the June 2018 elections but re-nominated and re-elected in the June 2018 elections. Previous decisions of the Constitutional Court were pointed to a precedent. Berberoğlu took an oath and regained his deputy mandate after the court was forced to release him. However, the authorities did not leave Berberoğlu in peace, and as soon as the court convicted him again for the same case, his immunity was revoked without waiting for the result of the appeal to the Constitutional Court and he was re-arrested.

Considering Berberoğlu’s complaint, the Constitutional Court decided a few days ago that his rights to "freely act, be elected, and perform his duties in the legislature" were restricted. However, the parliamentary faction of the main opposition party appealed to Speaker Mustafa Şentop in the spring of this year to postpone the announcement of the decision to revoke Enis Berberoğlu’s deputy immunity until September, but Mustafa Şentop, the Speaker of the Turkish parliament, had not waited for September.

Following the verdict of the Constitutional Court on the violation of Berberoğlu’s rights, the parliamentary faction of the main opposition party appealed to Şentop and demanded that the Istanbul MP be given the deputy mandate again.

The reader may ask why I went into so much detail about the violation of the rights of a member of parliament? Let me explain. My goal is to draw attention to the importance that the Turkish Constitutional Court attaches to human rights, that is why I went to so much detail in the example of an MP.

Erdoğan’s government gave this power to the Turkish Constitutional Court in late 2013. Because entrusting the country's justice system to a sect that later emerged as a terrorist organization had created a deplorable situation in the field of human rights, Turkey had become the most complained country in the European Court of Human Rights.

After citizens were given the right to appeal to the Constitutional Court in person, the number of appeals to the ECtHR was incomparably reduced, and the Constitutional Court, formerly the gate of hope for opposition parties, is now a haven for citizens. Objective decisions taken in recent years have significantly expanded the scope of human rights maneuvering.

Although this situation is sometimes disliked by the head of state and sometimes by the interior minister, the Constitutional Court continues to perform its duties without regard to anyone, especially the president.

On the day the Turkish Constitutional Court ruled that the rights of a former journalist, editor-in-chief, MP Enis Berberoğlu had been violated, the European Court of Human Rights fined Baku 20,000 euros for Azerbaijani journalist Rauf Mirgadirov.

In such cases, nothing comes to mind except the words of the late Heydar Aliyev "One nation, two states". Based on that word, I looked on the Internet again and saw that the chairman of the Constitutional Court has been the same person since June 24, 2003. And former justice minister, chairman of the Supreme Court, has been a judge of the Constitutional Court for 15 years.

Of course, "democracy must be choked in the cradle..."

Mayis Alizade