Erdogan-Constitutional Court Struggle Continues

• 02.29.2016, 20:02
• Greta Avetisyan
•  Region,  World,  Analytics

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After the 2010 constitutional amendments in Turkey the powers of the Constitutional Court changed. If previously Court took its decisions in the form of plenary, after the amendments, when individual applications were introduced, two Sections and three Commissions under each Section have been established. Due to these amendments the Constitutional Court is now taking such decisions that angers Erdogan.

Another reason for Erdogan’s fury was the ruling of the Court to release two Turkish opposition journalists charged with revealing state secrets. According to alaraby.co.uk the Cumhuriyet newspaper's editor-in-chief Can Dundar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul have been detained since November over a report alleging that  Erdogan's government tried to ship arms to Islamists rebels in Syria.

According to the ruling of the Constitutional Court the imprisonment of the two prominent journalists is a violation of their rights to the freedom of expression. However, Erdogan’s reaction to this was quite furious, saying that he does not respect the ruling. "The Constitutional Court may have reached such a verdict. I would only remain silent. I am not in a position to accept it. I do not obey it nor do I respect it," Hurriyet quotes Erdogan’s words. According to him, media cannot have unlimited freedom, calling what Dundar and Gul wrote as an attack on him. Of course, everything has its limits – including any kind of freedom, but it seems Erdogan’s limits to the freedom of expression are equal to no freedom. This is not the only case that journalists were arrested for "insulting" Erdogan, as he likes to say. In the first seven months of Erdogan’s presidency, 236 people were investigated - and 105 were indicted - for allegedly insulting the president. Among them are journalists as well as students, civil activists, scholars, artists, and even a former Miss Turkey, euobserver wrires.  However, it was especially during the Turkish parliamentary elections in 2015 Turkey’s policy towards media freedom became obvious for the whole world. "There, we have seen worrying developments in the last weeks in the run-up to the elections, such as the intimidation of journalists in various forms. Let me be very clear: Freedom of media is at the core of the EU integration process and is not negotiable," Johannes Hahn, the European Commissioner in charge of enlargement negotiations, said in November, 2015, The Wall Street Journal writes. 

Anyway, to come back to Erdogan-Constitutional Court struggle, some other examples should also be brought to show that there were other rulings as well that made Erdogan angry. In 2015 a law that the AKP passed some 16 months ago declaring all private university prep courses illegal was annulled by the Court. Earlier, in 2014 when the Turkish government banned Twitter, the Court called the Twitter ban "illegal, arbitrary and a serious restriction on the right to obtain information," the New York Times reports. 

So what is the reason that the judges of the Constitutional Court do not "obey" Erdogan and make him angry? The Constitutional Court has 17 judges, of whom three were appointed by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, 10 by Gul, three were elected by the parliament and only one appointed by Erdogan. This shows that the judges are not his "people" and he has not much leverage on them. However, with constitutional amendments that Erdogan for so long time is seeking, this "mistake" will most likely be corrected.