“Potemkin Courts”: Judicial System in Turkey

Lawyer Selçuk Kozağaçlı

Context note: A member of the People’s Law Office and the chair of the now-banned Contemporary Lawyers’ Association, Selçuk Kozağaçlı is a prominent lawyer from Turkey. Kozağaçlı is well-known for his and his office’s involvements in worker’s rights, human rights and revolutionary activism cases that exposed the oppresive and exploitative nature of the Turkish government and the bourgeoisie. Therefore, the ruling classes continously tried silencing the members of the People’s Law Office, arresting them with accusations of terrorism-related crimes. The recent wave of arrests against the group took place in November 2017, and Kozağaçlı is still in prison. Two other members of the Law Office, Lawyer Ebru Timtik and Lawyer Aytaç Ünsal are currently on a hunger strike unto death that was launched to protest the unfair trial process.

The text below is Kozağaçlı’s defence as to the allegations by the prosection. Instead of raising a conventional legal defence, however, here Kozağaçlı builds a political one that questions the credibility of Turkish courts and likens them to “Potemkin Villages”: Courts that are designed to create the misperception that there is rule of law in the country, even though the judicial system has long-collapsed.

Please click here to download the PDF [printable] version of the text.

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Potemkin Courts

Selçuk Kozağaçlı

 

1.

It’s useless to talk about the file.

Not just because the file is prepared too badly to deserve comment, but also it’s because for you to know that we don’t share with you the illusion that we are facing an actual “case file” here. Instead, it’s going to be much more meaningful to start immediately talking about the real issue between us.

The Soviet novelist Sholokhov tells a story in And Quiet Flows the Don. It’s in that section where the youngsters tease each other while waiting for the ataman’s meeting to start: “… Have you heard the story of a gypsy who spent the night in the steppe and had nothing but a fishing net to cover himself? When the bitter cold began to bite him, he woke up, put his finger in one of the meshes in the net, then turned to his mother and said ‘See? It had been the draught from the hole and I thought the weather was getting cold.’”

We refuse to put our finger in one of the many meshes in your “case file” and say, “Here! We found the place that was creating a draught!”

A defendant who tries to protect his rights by trusting the “Turkish Criminal Justice System” will surely freeze to death, very much like the Gypsy who lied to himself as he was trying to keep himself warm with a fishnet. Because you’re not real, you’re not institutional, you’re not trustworthy. In short, you do not exist and “have never existed”.