10/12/22
A crucial piece of advice; If you are a senior Turkish judge who is close enough to a drug lord to take a photo of him and his family while he is being sought for murder, beware of any reflective surfaces behind your boss. If, however, you are unlucky enough to be identified from your reflection and lose your job as a judge, you can rejoice in the fact that the Turkish Bar Association will welcome you as a lawyer with open arms. Ask Kemal Alver; he would tell you all about it.
As we mark another Human Rights Day, hundreds of our fellow lawyers still languish in Turkish prisons. The Turkish Government’s crackdown on lawyers using the failed coup of July 2016 as a pretext has not lost momentum even after more than 6 years. Our colleagues continue to be harassed, intimidated, and arrested for simply doing their jobs. Their client lists continue to be the primary evidence for their arrests together with what newspapers they read, or which bank they held accounts in. As of this Human Rights Day, more than 1600 of our colleagues have been detained for membership in a terrorist organisation under Turkey’s infamously vague anti-terror laws which Erdogan’s governments have been shamelessly abusing in order to silence dissent.
The Turkish judiciary as shaped by Erdogan himself following the implication of his son in corruption together with his ministers back in 2013, has been instrumental in the persecution of Turkish lawyers. Erdogan has dismissed, arrested, and imprisoned thousands of judges and prosecutors overnight and replaced them with his foot soldiers from the ranks of his own party and the nationalist MHP, his political ally. The past improper conduct of some judges was overlooked so long as they were prepared to do Erdogan’s bidding in cracking down on the opposition. It was finally the time of the likes of ex-judge Kemal Alver.
Shortly after the all-important HSYK election of October 2015 Erdogan entrusted the chair of the provincial “Commission on Justice ” of Samsun to Judge Alver who at the time was the president of Samsun High Criminal Court. The commission is a critical judicial body which is responsible for providing reports about members of the judiciary on which the HSK bases its decisions of promotion or demotion. It is also responsible for recruiting court clerks.
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Tagged: Arrested Lawyers, Turkey
IAPL Monitoring Committee on Attacks on Lawyers 
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