Faik Umut Özsu
Third Year
Human Rights Association of Turkey (Turkey)
Turkey is currently in the process of absorbing a variety of
broad-based legal reforms. The Criminal Code has undergonesystematicrevision; many of the most authoritarian provisions in the current Constitution – itself a product of a military coup in 1980 – have been amended or scrapped; and to the bewilderment of many observers, a number of formally binding but heretofore unimplemented pieces of legislation have come to be applied across the country for the first time in years. Much of the enthusiasm and speed with which these changes have been undertaken can, of course, be attributed to the government’s desire to satisfy the institutional requirements for EU accession. Since the rejection of its initial bid for full membership in 1989– when chronic abuses of bureaucratic authority, widespreadapplications of torture, and a general unwillingnessto grantdistinctive entitlementstominority groupscombined withseemingly uncontrollablerates of inflation and highly protectionist tradepoliciesto defeat any hope ofan immediate inauguration ofbilateral negotiations – Turkey hasproceeded along a fairly consistent, if rather “untraditional”,course of “integration-oriented”reforms. Nevertheless, the widespread acceptance and approval of these measurestestifies to the strength of the post-Kemalist Anatolian bourgeoisie, which hasmobilized its demographic weight and mercantile dynamism in a programmatic drive to recruit Western norms of liberal democracy as instruments with which to check the power of the generals and further the enlargement of civil liberties. Indeed, while it may seem as though Turkey’s military intelligentsia were intentionallyallowing parliamentary authorities to ransack existing structures in the name of an arduous butostensibly necessary process of Europeanization, it is ultimatelyin the self-understanding of the socially conservativeand rapidly growing middle-class that the sources of these developmentsought to be located. Grantedsufficient power to upset the establishment’s decades-long hold on policy formulation, thisclass hasstrategically adorned itself with the trappings of Western liberalism in an attempt to put post-war human rightsnormsto work in the construction of a rehabilitated civil society, one in which everything from proliferating information technologies to ever-expandingspheres of unregulated commercial competitionwill be brought to bear uponthe historical hegemony of Republican ideology.
Spendingasummer with the Human Rights Association of Turkey, the most extensiveorganization of its kind on the domestic scene, provided me with a unique opportunity to record and study these developments.Since its establishment in 1986, the Association has been committed to (1) improving conditions in local and provincial prisons, (2) documenting and investigating “disappearances”, (3) combating the use of torture by the police and gendarmerie, (4) pressing for the abolition of the death penalty and the revision of existing penal legislation, (5) ensuring the availability of effective remedies for violations of social, economic, and cultural rights in addition to those of an unquestionably civil or political nature, (6) training teachers and practicing lawyers in international human rights law, and (7) publishing brochures, reports, and monographs with respect to a variety of human rights-related issues. (In the early 1990s, it responded to the escalation in violence between state security agents and PKK separatists in the south-east by adding aneighth commitment to this list: the documentation of and legal struggle against human rights violations perpetrated by military forces, state-sponsored paramilitaries, and Kurdish guerillas.)Based in Ankara, I assisted the Association’s central office in its efforts to compile databases of human rights violations,translateda number ofitsbulletinsinto English, and participated in the preparation of pressstatementsrelating to such incidents asthe apparent murder of the son of a prominent member of the Association by police officers in Adana. In addition, I wasable to gather material on the socio-economic status of women in urban slums (gecekondular), particularly those who had suffered some form of retribution for having actually or allegedly engaged in activities of a “dishonorable” (namussuz) character.