Turkish Politics

The Constitutional Court has ruled to annul a provision that punishes all sexual acts against children under the age of 15 as “sexual abuse,” stirring outrage from academics and women’s rights activists who warn that the decision will lead to cases of child abuse going unpunished.

The Constitutional Court discussed the issue upon an application from a district court, which complained that the current law does not discriminate between age groups in cases of child sexual abuse and treats a 14-year-old as equal to a four-year-old.

The local court said the law does not provide legal consequences for the “consent” of victims in cases where the child victim is from 12 to 15 years of age and able to understand the meaning of the sexual act. “This creates an imbalance between legal benefits and sanctions that should be preserved in crime and punishment,” the application stated.

With seven votes against six, the Constitutional Court agreed with the local court and decided to annul the provision. The decision will come into effect on Jan. 13, 2017.

The local court’s argument and the Constitutional Court’s endorsement have drawn a backlash from academic and human rights circles, which underlined that all individuals under the age of 18 are considered children according to international conventions to which Turkey is a party.

“First of all, every individual under the age of 18 is a ‘child’ according to international conventions. Seeking a child’s consent in cases of sexual abuse is out of the question,” the chair of the Association to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect, Professor Bahar Gökler, told Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency.

Gökler said this “calamitous” decision was in violation of child rights.

The general secretary of the same association, Professor Aysun Baransel, said consent could be sought in cases of sexual intercourse between peers, but it was impossible to speak of consent if the case involves a 60-year-old and a 15-year-old child.

“The most important point is that unless this provision is urgently addressed, child abusers will start walking around freely because there is no new regulation [to fill the void],” Baransel said.

She added that child sexual abusers will be tried with provisions related to the sexual abuse of adults following the ruling, as there will be no special law in place after Jan. 13.

The head of the Child Rights Center of the Ankara Bar Association, Sabit Aktaş, also warned that many children will suffer from the decision.

“We can foresee what this decision will bring about. Those jurists who are distant from society in their ivory towers should go to courtrooms to see and hear what those children go through when describing their experiences. They should only make a ruling on this issue after doing that,” Aktaş said. The coordinator of the Istanbul Women’s Associations, lawyer Nazan Moroğlu, challenged the argument of the local court that made the appeal in the first place, underlining that every judge has the option to choose between the legal upper limit or the lower limit, based on the nature of each case.

“To ignore [a judge’s discretion] and annul this provision will create big problems. It will lead to children being vulnerable to sexual abuse and rape, and will lead to more female children getting married at an early age without getting an education,” Moroğlu said.

She highlighted that the already acute problem of child brides in Turkey, of whom there are already around 3.5 million, would deepen following the ruling.

Activists are likely to seek a reversal of the Constitutional Court’s ruling. The head of the Turkey Federation of Women’s Association (TKDF), Canan Güllü said they are now considering bringing the case to the attention of the European Court of Human Rights.

“This decision will lead to unwanted marriages. People will be able to kidnap and rape children, marry them at an early age, and prevent them from going to school,” Güllü said.

“We are looking to see whether we can make an appeal to annul the decision. We could go to the European Court of Human Rights,” she added.

Six members of the Constitutional Court dissented from the ruling, saying it would “cause public indignation.” The Court has recently also annulled a provision that foresees at least 16 years of imprisonment in cases of child rape for the same reasons. That annulment is set to come into effect on Dec. 23, 2016.

The Economist:Turks are convinced that Europe and America had something to do with the attempted putsch

THE aftermath of the attempted coup in Turkey on July 15th has been fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Pro-government newspapers have alleged that CIA agents directed the coup from an island in the Sea of Marmara; that a retired American general wired billions of dollars to rogue Turkish soldiers; and that the United States directed Turkish forces to kill Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. An Islamist daily called Germany an enemy state, and pictured its chancellor, Angela Merkel, in a Nazi uniform.

The surge in anti-Western sentiment is widely shared. One poll found that 84% of Turks believe that the coup-plotters received help from abroad; more than 70% suspect America of having a hand. Mr Erdogan and his ministers have accused the West of double standards, and warn of a serious deterioration in ties unless the United States extradites Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based Islamist cleric whom they blame for orchestrating the coup. A senior American official complains that using Mr Gulen as the only yardstick for bilateral ties puts the relationship at risk. Mr Erdogan does not seem to care.

In part, Western governments have themselves to blame. With the exception of America and Germany, many were slow to condemn the coup attempt, fuelling suspicions that they were waiting to see how it would play out. In response to the purge of government institutions that followed, Austria’s chancellor urged the European Union to suspend membership talks with Turkey. Germany’s top court banned Mr Erdogan from addressing a rally in Cologne by video link. To date, no EU head of state has travelled to Turkey to express solidarity with the victims. A visit to Ankara by America’s vice-president, Joe Biden, due on August 24th, is seen as too little, too late. “The United States should have shown stronger political support earlier,” says Unal Cevikoz, a former Turkish ambassador to Britain.

Turkish politicians, including those opposed to the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party, accuse the West of being more critical of the government’s response to the coup than of the carnage that accompanied the putsch. Some Western diplomats acknowledge a failure to come to grips with the scale of the violence, which left some 270 dead, and with widespread support for the purges. “There is no understanding in Europe that things would have been much worse if the coup had succeeded,” says one. “For the Turks, this was a test of loyalty, and Europe failed it.”

Yet Europe is right to fear that the crackdown on suspected Gulen sympathizers has spun out of control. Over 80,000 people have been arrested, sacked or suspended, including soldiers, judges, teachers, policemen, businessmen and even football officials. Nearly 100 journalists have been detained and more than a hundred media outlets shut down; ordinary criminals have been set free to make room for political cases. Many of those purged appear to have only tenuous links to the Gulenists. But concerns about repression fall on deaf ears, writes Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat. The West, he says, “has eroded its ability to gain influence in Turkey at a time when this leverage is possibly more important than ever”.

Popular resentment against the West and the Gulenists has accomplished what Mr Erdogan had failed to in recent years: rally a large majority of Turks to his side. Since late June, the president’s approval rating has jumped from 47% to a record 68%. A mass gathering addressed by Mr Erdogan earlier this month attracted over a million people, as well as the leaders of two of the three biggest opposition parties. The main pro-Kurdish party was left out.

In Mr Erdogan’s view, only one outside power has adequately backed his government: Russia. Before meeting Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on August 9th, the Turkish leader praised him for wasting no time in offering his support. Unlike Western officials, Mr Erdogan pointedly remarked, “Putin did not criticise me on the number of people from the military or civil service who had been dismissed”.

Such plaudits, along with Mr Erdogan’s show of contrition for Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet last November, are music to Mr Putin’s ears. Yet much as the Russian leader might want to exploit the rift between Turkey and the West, his dalliance with Mr Erdogan has its limits. Mr Putin might offer Turkey some support against the Gulenists in Central Asia, where the movement runs a network of schools, says Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute, a think-tank. But the two countries will remain divided over the crucial issue of Syria, where they are still backing opposite sides in the country’s civil war.

For now, says a Western diplomat, NATO need not fear that Turkey will stray far from the alliance. But, he continues, Mr Putin will continue to pit Turkey against America and the EU: “He can play that game better than anyone else.” For a decade, Turkey’s once pro-European government has been drifting away from the West. After the ambivalent American and European responses to the coup, that drift is accelerating.

An Islamist daily called Germany an enemy state, and pictured its chancellor, Angela Merkel, in a Nazi uniform.

Turkey said it had dismissed a further 10,000 civil servants and closed 15 more media outlets over suspected links with terrorist organizations and U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Ankara for orchestrating a failed coup in July.

Turkey has jailed opposition M Ps, accused Germany of sheltering terrorists, and threatened, once again, to scrap the EU migrant deal.

Police on Thursday (3 November) arrested 11 M Ps from the liberal and pro-Kurdish HDP opposition party, including two of its co-chiefs, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, who were dragged from their homes in the town of Diyarbakir in a midnight raid.

The operation, which included a blackout of Twitter, Facebook, and Whats App, came after police, on Monday, detained 13 senior staff from Cumhuriyet, one of Turkey's oldest newspapers.

The crackdown is part of a purge of alleged sympathisers with July’s failed coup and with Kurdish separatists.

Authorities have put 37,000 people behind bars, dismissed 100,000 from government posts, and shut down 170 media outlets.

They have also spoken of reinstating the death penalty - a move that would end Turkey’s EU membership bid.

“We are openly discussing the death penalty in the party and the government”, Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, told the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a Swiss newspaper, on Thursday.

“President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan has emphasised that he would ratify an adoption by parliament … if parliament agreed, he would not resist it”, Cavusoglu said.

Erdogan, at a rally in Ankara on Thursday, also accused Germany of sheltering “terrorists”, referring to pro-Kurdish groups and to loyalists of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic guru who lives in the US and whom Turkey says instigated the July putsch.

"We are concerned that Germany, which for years took the PKK and DHKP-C [Kurdish groups] under its wings, has become the backyard of Feto [the Gulenist group]”, Erdogan said.

“Germany has become one of the most important countries in which terrorists find shelter”, he said.

Watch out Merkel Cavusoglu, the foreign minister, in his Neue Zuercher Zeitung interview, threatened to scrap an EU deal under which Turkey stops migrants from going to Greece if Europe did not immediately lift visa requirements for Turkish nationals.

“Our patience is drawing to a close. We are waiting for an answer [on the visa pact] these days. If that does not come, we will cancel the agreement”, he said.

“We do not wait until the end of the year”, he added.

He said Turkey had fulfilled all but one of the EU’s 72 technical requirements, but he said it would not fulfil the last condition - to amend counter-terrorism laws so that they cannot be used to jail journalists and dissidents.

“In terror, I see no other possibilities. We can not make any concessions”, he said.

He said that if the migrant flow resumed, it would cost German chancellor Angela Merkel in terms of political support. “If ... they are going to Europe, Mrs Merkel is the most under pressure,” he said.

’Extremely worried’ The HDP arrests prompted EU foreign relations chief Federica Mogherini to call a meeting of EU ambassadors in Ankara on Friday.

She said she was “extremely worried” by the development.

Erdogan’s remarks also drew a rebuke from the German foreign minister.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier told press in Berlin on Thursday that he "cannot comprehend the comments made by Erdogan” on terrorism.

“Though we wish to have a close and constructive relationship with Turkey, let us not mince words. From our point of view, there are reasons to be concerned about threats to freedom of the press and freedom of opinion," he added.

German Green party leader, Cem Ozdemir, went further.

He told Passauer Neue Presse, a German newspaper, that the HDP arrests amounted to "a second coup" and that Erdogan had turned Turkey into a "big prison”.

Asli Erdogan, a Turkish novelist jailed for alleged links to Kurdish separatists, appealed for EU help in an open letter sent from her cell in the Bakirkoy Prison in Istanbul.

“I believe that a totalitarian regime in Turkey will unavoidably shake all of Europe”, she said. “Europe should assume its responsibility for the values it has defined … We need all your solidarity and support”, she said.

Economic cost The anti-Gulen purge has extended to the business community.

Turkey has arrested 116 employees from its banking regulator, 30 from its Capital Markets Board, and more than 1,500 people from its finance ministry.

It has also seized assets of two its largest firms, Koza Ipek Holding, a minerals conglomerate, and Boydak Holding, a chemicals, steel, and energy company.

Ratings agencies, such as Moody’s and S&P have cut the country’s investment grade, the Turkish lira has plunged in value, and equity funds have pulled billions out of Turkish portfolios over the past few months, the Wall Street Journal, a US newspaper, reported on Friday.

“The risks are disproportionately high,” Michael Harris, the head of research at Renaissance Capital bank, which has advised its clients to dump Turkish investments, told the newspaper.

“A lot of foreign investors are understandably jittery”, he said.