08 December 2021
No rule of law?
Something out of the ordinary, something very strange, something seriously concerning happened at the second section of the European Court of Human Rights on 23 November 2021. Continue reading >>
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16 March 2021
Year One: Reflections on Turkey’s Legal Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Ever since the first officially reported COVID-19 case in the country in March in 2020, Turkey, like most of the world, has taken measures to control the pandemic. The measures taken by Turkey included limitations on freedom of movement, closing schools and moving to online teaching at schools as and universities, restrictions on business opening hours, cessation of prison and detention visits, prohibition of resignation for healthcare staff, and, more stringently, the introduction of curfews. Continue reading >>
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24 December 2020
The Whole Is More than the Sum of its Parts
The long-awaited Demirtaş v. Turkey (No 2) Grand Chamber judgment has finally been delivered, twenty two months after referral and sixteen months since the 18 September 2019 hearing. The judgment, arguably the most important from the Grand Chamber in 2020, is highly significant for both political and jurisprudential reasons. Politically, the case concerns the ongoing deprivation of liberty of Selahattin Demirtaş – the former leader of the left-wing, pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the second-largest opposition party in Turkey. Continue reading >>25 November 2020
LawRules #10: We need to talk about the European Convention on Human Rights
Europe is larger than the EU – and a European framework aiming at preserving basic rights and freedoms as well as rule of law safeguards has been in place for 70 years precisely this November: the European Convention on Human Rights. Today, we take a deeper look at the Convention and at the institutions that work to enforce it: The European Court of Human Rights and the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe. Are they capable of adding another layer of human rights and rule of law protection to the European legal framework? What kind of support do those institutions need in order to be able to fulfill their task? And how is their status today, 70 years after the European Convention on Human Rights has been signed? Continue reading >>07 October 2020
The Two Faces German Legal Hegemony?
I write this blog post just as I complete my fourth year as a professor of international law in Berlin. I am, as von Bogdandy calls, a Bildungsausländerin. My university education was first in Turkey and then in the United Kingdom. My academic career has been, for the most part, in the UK and then in Turkey. When I moved to Berlin from Istanbul four years ago to take up the professorship of international law at the Hertie School, I imagined Berlin to be somewhere between Istanbul and London. I hoped that it would be the best of both worlds, I would find a home in a city with a handsome Turkish speaking community at a university that conducts education and research in English. I also hoped that speaking Berlin’s two oft-spoken languages, Turkish and English, I would survive with my basic German, and learn more of it along the way and become a late Berliner. Continue reading >>
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30 July 2020
Stay Away from Using your Constitutional Rights
The Academics for Peace Petition is a petition signed by over 2,200 academics in and outside Turkey in 2016. It became, however, more than a simple petition. This collection of signatures put in motion mass criminal proceedings, job dismissals and many other forms of administrative and social sanctions against hundreds of academics in Turkey. This reaction is unprecedented in terms of scale and effects in contemporary times. Continue reading >>
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19 February 2020
Byzantine Manoeuvres
The case of Osman Kavala, just as that of Selahettin DemirtaÅŸ, shows that that a system that breeds Article 18 violations responds to these judgments through yet more Article 18 violations. Bad faith rulings in Strasbourg have so far only received bad faith responses. Continue reading >>30 May 2019
No Going Nuclear in Strasbourg
Mammadov v. Azerbaijan, the much anticipated judgment handed down by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights yesterday, is no ordinary judgment. It is the first time the Court has ruled in an ‘infringement procedure’ – the most serious form of political pressure that members of the Council of Europe can exert on one of their own short of expulsion from the club. Continue reading >>
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13 June 2018
“Academics for Peace“ and their Freedom of Expression
The ‘Academics for Peace Petition’, published in January 2016, was signed by around two thousand academics from both Turkey and from abroad. The petition raised concerns, using strong language, about the conduct of Turkish security forces in their counter-terrorism operations carried out in response to violent actions by the PKK terrorist group and their supporters in south-east Turkey in the summer of 2015. One signatory, Füsun Üstel, professor of political science, was found guilty of committing the crime of terrorist propaganda under Article 7(2) of the Turkish Counter Terrorism Law and now faces fifteen months of imprisonment. The constitutional protection of Üstel’s freedom of expression has not been respected by the court in its judicial reasoning. Continue reading >>22 January 2018