Turkey’s president picks a fight with the Council of Europe

FOR 73 YEARS Turkey has been a member of the Council of Europe, the organisation established in 1949, long before there was a European Union, to protect fundamental human rights on European soil in the wake of the second world war. Recent developments suggest it may not be a member for much longer.

Council members agree to abide by the European Convention on Human Rights and to accept the jurisdiction of its Strasbourg-based court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Last week the court concluded that the conviction of Yuksel Yalcinkaya, an alleged plotter in an attempted coup in 2016, who was sentenced to six years in jail, had been “decisively” based on his use of a messaging app called Bylock. This, it said, constituted “systemic violations” of the right to a fair trial. Around 8,500 other people have lodged similar complaints with the court against their convictions, and up to 100,000 have been identified as Bylock users, and therefore potential coup-plotters, by the Turkish authorities. The ECHR ordered Turkey to take measures to rectify the violations.

Two days after the judgment in Mr Yalcinkaya’s case, Turkey’s highest appeals court overturned an appeal by Osman Kavala, a businessman and philanthropist handed a full-life sentence in April 2022. He had been convicted of attempting to overthrow the government because of his alleged involvement in anti-government protests (pictured) at Gezi Park in central Istanbul in 2013 and in the attempted coup. The ECHR had previously ruled that there were “serious issues” with Mr Kavala’s conviction.

In all, Turkish applicants have 24,700 cases pending at the ECHR, nearly a third of the total. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan increasingly views the court as an annoyance whose judgments can be disregarded. The attempted coup sparked a mass purge of the Turkish judiciary. Around 7,000 judges and prosecutors were sacked and replaced with political loyalists or newly graduated novices.

In his speech at the opening of parliament on October 1st, Mr Erdogan described the Bylock judgment as “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. “Even England, a founding member of the system, could not tolerate the ECHR,” he added, an apparent reference to a push by some members of Britain’s governing Conservative Party to withdraw from the convention. “We can neither respect the decisions of institutions aligned with terrorist organisations, nor listen to what they say.”

The antagonism is mutual. Frank Schwabe, the head of the German parliamentary delegation to the Council of Europe, says that the council’s parliamentary assembly will increase its pressure to launch infringement procedures against member states that ignore ECHR rulings. “The Council of Europe must make clear that any state which persistently refuses to implement a final judgment of the ECHR cannot continue to be a member of this institution,” he says.

Only two members have ever left the council. In 1969 Greece’s junta pulled out to avoid imminent expulsion (the country returned to the fold when democracy was restored in 1974). And in March last year Russia was expelled after its invasion of Ukraine. Turkey joined the council in 1950 as the 13th member, and is currently the largest by population. Its withdrawal would be an even bigger reverse for the body than Russia’s expulsion, and perhaps provide encouragement to ECHR-sceptics in London.

For Turks, withdrawal from the convention and the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg court would remove their last means of redress in their sclerotic and unreliable legal system. It would also mark a definite end to Turkey’s long-stalled candidacy for EU membership; no state has joined the bloc without first being a member of the council, now a formal legal requirement for membership. The EU itself recognises the jurisdiction of the ECHR.

Mr Erdogan has been trying to play nice with his European allies since his narrow election victory in May, in the hope of wooing back the foreign investors that have deserted Turkey in recent years. But at home he wins votes by pushing back against Western censure. With crucial local elections due next March, he may reckon that Turkey’s council membership is worth sacrificing.■