As Turkey Again Eyes EU Membership Requirements, Pressure Builds to Liberalize Turkish Constitution

By Jon Gorvett

“Turkey should not enter the new millennium with a Constitution whose depth of legitimacy is close to zero.” These words came not from a radical reformer or barricade politician, but from a much more surprising source: the head of Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals.

Speaking in Ankara at the September inauguration of the new judicial year, Judge Sami Selcuk went on to describe the constitution as having been “imposed” on the Turkish people in a “fictional referendum” and entirely lacking in “structural legitimacy.” He also said all this to an audience that included President Suleyman Demirel, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit and the chief of the General Staff, General Huseyin Kivrikoglu.

Others who have voiced the same conclusions may have ended up behind the bars of Selcuk’s justice system’s jails. So the absence of any such reaction on this occasion gave rise to speculation that some substantive and significant reform may be in the offing for Turkey’s much maligned Constitution.

Indeed, within a few days of Selcuk’s speech, Prime Minister Ecevit himself was saying that his three-party coalition government would offer concrete legislative proposals to amend the Constitution when parliament reopened. And when parliament opened its doors in October, President Demirel added his not insubstantial weight to calls for reform.

“The 1982 Constitution,” Demirel said in reference to the current law, “is not totally democratic in terms of its preparation, proposals, acceptance and, lastly, in terms of its conditions and content.”

Since the Turkish republic was founded in 1923, it has had a variety of different constitutions. In the post-World War II era, President Ismet Inonu first set the ball rolling by introducing a multi-party system. But it backfired badly on him personally as his Republican People’s Party lost the first two-party election to Adnan Menderes’ Democratic Party.

Menderes, and this first experiment, came to an abrupt end with the 1960 military coup, followed by the execution of Menderes.

The new Constitution introduced in 1961 is a document most remembered today for its highly progressive, democratic nature.

“Unfortunately,” says Haluk Sahin, a leading columnist for the respected daily Radikal, “this changed in a conservative direction in 1971,”—the year of the next military coup—“and then was thrown aside completely by the 1980 coup.”

“The 1982 Constitution is not totally democratic.”

The present Constitution was drafted largely by the military and was presented to referendum in 1983 without alternatives. Even so, it was only passed by a small margin.

Since then it has seen a number of changes. Most notably, the political rights of the politicians banned and arrested in the 1980 coup—a group which includes most of Turkey’s current party leaders—were restored early on, and in 1985 students and professors were also allowed to join parties.

The third change to have occurred was the ending of the state monopoly on broadcasting. The fourth change, most recently, was the dropping of a military judge from the State Security Courts, a move prompted by European complaints during the trial of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.

But that’s more or less it.

“In terms of constitutional change,” continues Sahin, “Turkey has historically responded to two stimuli: the military, and the state of the world.”

Inonu’s introduction of an electoral system came at a time when Turkey was desperately seeking to join NATO. Subsequent constitutions were the result of new putsches. That the calls now are coming at a time when Turkey is making another push for acceptance by the EU is no mere coincidence, Sahin argues. “Turkey has promised to change in accordance with EU rules, so constitutional changes must fit with this timetable.”

In mid-October, the European Commission recommended Turkey be granted candidate status for EU membership, though no accession talks are to begin until Turkey has met the Copenhagen criteria—the set of entry requirements the EU sets for all candidate countries. These rules include numerous political as well as economic criteria, and would mean substantive reforms in Turkey.

They are perhaps too substantive for some. In contrast to the Supreme Court of Appeals chief, another juridical voice, that of the chief public prosecutor, Vural Savas, was also raised loudly in October.

Savas led the prosecution which closed the Islamist Welfare Party in early 1998. He currently is preparing a case to close down Welfare’s Islamist successor, Virtue. Speaking in defense of his prosecution recently, he claimed that if Turkey were to implement all the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, “this would mean a process generated by [them]...will begin and at the end of it we will have a state without an ideology.”

Controversial Europeanization

In other words, Europeanization would mean an end to Turkey’s “Kemalist structure,” the institutions and political concepts established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s and ’30s.

And there is irony in the fact that “Europeanization” was one of the central principles of that very Kemalist structure.

“An atmosphere is being created for substantial changes,” says Professor Iltur Turan of Istanbul’s Bilgi University, “but this is not very likely.”

Sahin agrees. “Almost everyone agrees the 1982 Constitution is not the one Turkey deserves,” he says, “but a sweeping change will not happen.”

Turan also points out that a major problem is not in the letter of the existing Constitution, but in its implementation. “Torture is not mentioned in the 1982 Constitution, yet it happens,” he comments.

Ecevit’s government, however, is uniquely placed to make changes among the administrations that have tried to govern Turkey since the last coup. The current government undoubtedly has the numbers in parliament, and it also would have the support of powerful parts of Turkish society who see the country’s future in an ever-closer relationship with the EU, and the broad support of the Turkish public, which has long expressed dissatisfaction with the current political system.

However, although the parties may all be agreed on the need for change, the devil is undoubtedly in the details. Only time will tell if Ecevit can manage to pull something out of the constitutional hat again.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.