Be sure to read this, prosecutors and judges!

It will have no effect if I say it; someone will even come out and say “He’s griping about the seven and a half year sentence he got.”

If a Kurdish politician or even a CHP politician were to say it, there will be those who turn up their noses. But, the rather grave paragraph you are about to read below is not mine, but a prosecutor’s. And of a prosecutor who put up an exemplary legal struggle to prove how the Gülen Brotherhood had become a “criminal organisation” in the investigation into the “cassette plot” that ousted Deniz Baykal, and who attained fame through this: Ankara Republic Prosecutor Bülent Yücetürk.

I addressed judges and prosecutors in the title. However, you read it if it escaped your attention. And go back to the start and read it once more. (Prosecutors and judges should read it five times, and if this does not suffice, five times more.)

I quote it slightly abridged:

“...A legal crisis has been entered that is unequalled in any period of the history of the Republic of Turkey. We are undergoing a process in which court rulings are not applied by courts themselves. The judiciary, in turn, has lost its conscience and has surrendered its entire will to a force. (...) It has finally become impossible to be part of this corrupted judicial system and to rectify the broken judicial system.”

Have you gone cold inside?

Even my inside went cold, as one who has been well at the receiving end of the Turkish judicial power. These are the words of a prosecutor who is from the very interior of the judicial power and has been a direct witness of all stages of the judicial machine from first-instance courts to the very top, the Court of Cassation.

 ***

 Is prosecutor Bülent Yücetürk exaggerating?

Is he bellyaching and casting aspersions?

Or is he, in the spring of 2018, thumping the reality of the Turkish judiciary onto the face of the judicial machine in the form of a hard slap?

Why would you say presidential candidate Muharrem İnce felt the need to say, “When I am president, judges will not stand and button their jackets in my presence?”

From the Justice Ministry’s official figures, there are currently 69,301 students in jail. Most of them, unable to attend exams and not provided with their text books, are in jail based on the sources (sources?) named “anonymous tip-offs,” accepted as being “reasonable” even in the senior judiciary disgusting as they are. I skip the legality of this and have long since skipped the justice of this, but is there anyone who believes this even to accord with prevailing statutes?

Does anyone know how many HDP members of parliament are still detained or convicted because the armour of immunity does not function for them? I admit that I have lost count. The number more or less changes every day.

I have finally grown sick of writing, and you of reading, about it. What crimes did those imprisoned journalists really commit for judges to have handed down those heavy penalties, and are they extending those harsh detention orders without break?

Do the prosecutors who seek those sentences and the judges who hand down those sentences genuinely believe that they comply with the law and are fair and correct?

I repeat: Do they genuinely believe this?

Or?

Come on, look at these questions a small portion of which I have been able to reel off and also weigh what prosecutor Bülent Yücetürk has to say on these scales.

I summon you once more:

Prosecutors and judges!

Read the quote set out in bold letters in this article, then read it again, then again...

 Eyyy savcılar, yargıçlar bunu okuyun!..