During a surprise appearance at the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Wednesday 12 October, Turkey’s Deputy European Affairs Minister Ali Şahin defended the actions of his government in response to the attempted coup on 15 July.
Laying the blame for the attempted coup at the door of supporters of Fethallah Gulen, the minister said that the state had to be put back on its feet and terrorist elements cleaned out. For this reason, he stated, the government has invoked Article 21 of the Turkish constitution and imposed a state of emergency. Şahin said that the situation is being managed democratically. He pointed out that a state of emergency was not unfamiliar to Europe, indicating that eight member states, including France, are at different stages of the state of emergency. The situation is very serious throughout Turkey, he said, adding that it is probably more serious than the one that led France to declare its state of emergency.
Opposite him, MEPs criticised the arrests of numbers of judges and prosecutors, the suspensions of tens of thousands of teachers, the closure of many parts of the media and reports of abuse and torture in prisons. They described the Turkish government’s reaction as disproportionate. Şahin replied that many kinds of complaints mechanisms are in place and everyone has access to legal representation.
Non-governmental organisations were able to take part in the second part of the debate, at which the Turkish minister was not present. Emma Sinclair-Webb from Human Rights Watch described the current situation as one of severe repression which was having repercussions on hundreds of thousands of people. She complained of illegal detentions, reprisals against the families and friends of those suspected of being Gulen supporters or of having taken part in the failed coup, and of police detentions lasting 30 days and allegations of poor treatment in prison. There is an atmosphere of fear, she said. The measures taken after the attempted coup are resulting in repression of all kinds of people who were not in any way involved in the attempted coup, she stated.
Simone Gaboriau of the European magistrates’ organisation, MEDEL, condemned the treatment being meted out to members of the judiciary, 3,390 of whom have been sacked without knowing whether an appeals procedure might be open to them. MEDEL, she stated, had, for several years, been consistently arguing that the rule of law, on which great progress had been made, has been shrinking. This, she stressed, was not a corporate complaint but a statement that the judiciary is no longer independent and impartial, and that a fair trial is no longer possible. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)