Injustice Ministry

Or, we may just try to give credit to the "Late justice is itself injustice" saying, take into account the confession and the apology of the new minister and rename it the Injustice Ministry. Yes, I am making a joke, but a bitter one that unfortunately is not so farfetched or so magniloquent because of the unfortunate but yet burlesque realities of this country. I definitely have no intention of talking about how one can buy justice and land myself in court under Penal Code’s contentious Article 301 on charges of insulting the Turkish judiciary. For the same "egoistic" reason, nor will I talk about how useful it might be to have some strong political or financial backing in escaping from some trivial charges. Oh my God, how difficult it is sometimes to avoid coming under Article 301 and yet "freely" express opinions that might not be appreciated by the government or corporate Turkey. There is such a vast freedom of expression in this beautiful, tolerant, shiny country, which hopefully will one day, perhaps on a Feb. 30, join the European club of democracies that while trying to move around the constitutional, legal or judicial minefields one feels like a belly dancer (no insult to belly dancers intended).

Naturally, I would like to talk about a Turkey where there is no political clout over the judiciary and indeed there is independence of justice; where the political authority is not meddling in justice and bending laws to suit its political agenda; where there is supremacy of law and everyone is equal in front of the law; where all the inmates in our prisons are convicts and there is no one waiting for months, sometimes well over one year, to see accusations brought against them in an indictment; where people are not shot in the back by security forces on grounds they did not hear an order to halt and those who shot an 19-year-old boy in the back of his head or those security personnel who wrote a false report on the case to "protect" their colleague are sentenced adequately; where ethnic, cultural, religious or political minorities are not perceived as potential risk for national security but as precious gems of this nation and where people are not persecuted, oppressed and even tortured just because they criticized the political authority or defended opinions not so compatible with the political authority or the established perceptions of society.

Do we have such a Turkey? Yes, there are relative improvements, but unfortunately not. It was great to see last year the justice minister apologizing to the family and friends of a young man tortured to death under detention after he was picked up while sitting on a bench in a park, but is it not better to really enforce the "no tolerance to torture" strategy of the government? It is great seeing the new justice minister confessing in front of cameras that while the overall capacity of Turkish prisons was 103,000 inmates, currently there were 106,000 inmates and that 60 percent of those inmates were detained people, many of them not yet officially charged and an indictment brought against them. But, to what purpose can such a confession serve if what the justice minister did was nothing more than disclosing some bitter statistical data and as if he were an opposition politician he had no idea or plans to make a correction to this incredibly bad situation for the justice system in the country.

A while ago the Justice Ministry punished a female judge who sentenced Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to a fine on grounds that she was late in writing the reasoning of the verdict. I have no intention defending a judge who was late writing reasoning of a verdict the court she was presiding made or have no intention at all to say that she was punished because she imposed a fine on the premier. But, I just cannot understand why the same Justice Ministry is not doing anything at all against, for example, a Sivas prosecutor who could not write an indictment against four university students detained almost a year ago after they organized an "anti-American" caricature exhibition or why the Ergenekon prosecutors have not completed writing an indictment against scores of academics, former bureaucrats, university professors, retired officers and some criminals, some of whom have been under detention almost a year. If this country’s prisons are full of people who have not yet been declared "guilty" by our courts, is not there a mistake somewhere? Is a justice minister required to take legal and administrative measures to correct that situation or complain to the media as if he is an opposition deputy and not the minister of a government who has been in office for the past more than six-year period?