Turkey: Human Rights and the Political Situation

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Thursday 9th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)]

I join the right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) in thanking you for chairing our proceedings, Mr Bone; I also congratulate her on initiating this important debate.

It is a given, I think, that Turkey is hugely important to us diplomatically and militarily as an important member of NATO, including as a listening post and airbase—particularly for the United States and Germany—and a place from which we can keep an eye on Syria and see what is going on there. Secondly, it is important to us as a country that has had to withstand huge numbers of refugees—I say “withstand”, which is to misuse the English language; it has taken in huge numbers of Syrian refugees and given them a haven. Some of those have moved through into the European Union; some of them have not. The fact that Turkey is a useful military ally and is to some extent a valuable trading and economic partner, and the fact that it has done good humanitarian work in looking after refugees does not, however, excuse its abusive behaviour towards its own citizens, its neglect of the rule of law and its wholesale abuse of human rights.

In 2015 I and two rather better lawyers, Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice, and Sir Jeffrey Jowell, who was at that stage the director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, and another member of my chambers, Sarah Palin, who is an expert in human rights law, were instructed by Turkish lawyers to write a report on abuses of human rights law and breaches of the rule of law in Turkey. I have registered that in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Our lay clients were an institute of Turkish journalists and a group related to or supportive of the Gülenist movement, although I never discovered whether they were actually part of it. The catalyst for their concern was the discovery in December 2013 of various telephone calls implicating the then Prime Minister, who is now the President, and a number of his cabinet Ministers and members of his family in wholesale corruption. As a consequence, the then Prime Minister and the party known as the AKP took it upon themselves to behave in a fairly repressive way in getting the police to investigate and arrest those thought to be antipathetic to their interests.

The number of those who were detained, arrested or moved—judges and police officers, for example, were moved from one part of Turkey to another, for the purpose of disruption—in 2014-15, ran into the hundreds, if not the thousands at that stage. The position got worse, of course: not only was there interference with Government officials who did not have the approval of the then Prime Minister and the Government party, the AKP; but the Government machine—it is difficult as far as I can see to draw a distinction between the Government machine and the political party, as they work in lockstep—started to interfere with the free media. It started to send in officials or police officers to take over newspapers, shut down television companies and generally interfere with rights of freedom of expression under the European convention. In any other democracy that would have led to riots on the street, I suspect. As it happened, it did not in Turkey—probably because huge numbers of the Turkish population, particularly in the eastern part of the country, have no access to the internet and no particular interest in some of the things that the professional classes, intellectuals and others in Ankara and Istanbul take an interest in.

We published our paper in the summer of 2015, and various western-based newspapers reported on it. It was alleged by the Turkish Government machine that those of us who had written the report as professional, dispassionate observers were Gülenists and part of the parallel state, whose job or intention it was to undermine the democratic Government of Turkey. That was not our intention, and certainly there is no evidence to suggest that the four of us, as English lawyers, had any interest in the matter at all as far as politics was concerned; we had every interest in the subject as far as the abuse of the rule of law and human rights were concerned.

Since the attempted coup, to which the right hon. Member for Enfield North referred, the situation in Turkey seems to have got worse. It was bad enough before, but it has got a lot worse. Tens of thousands—I think as many as 50,000—of officials, be they judges, police officers, members of the civil service or teachers, have been detained without trial. I have no knowledge of whether the attempted coup was “genuine” or a manufactured event. However, as someone has already pointed out, the President of Turkey has taken advantage in a wholly disproportionate way of the events of last summer.

We now face a position where the President wants to bring more power unto himself and is using the tactic of the referendum, which is coming up shortly, to achieve that purpose. Time does not allow me—nor would you, Mr Bone—to say all that I would like to say about the nature of that exercise or what is intended by it. However, it is fair to say that the President’s grasping of power in a personal way goes from the sublime to the ridiculous. It is sublime in the sense that all sorts of people have been arrested and detained without trial, and the prospect of the Turkish court system providing them with justice now that the President is influencing the appointment of judges strikes me as unlikely.

The European Court of Human Rights has already indicated—if it has not, the Council of Europe certainly has—that there is no rule of law in Turkey available to Turkish citizens and that emergency applications to the Court will be considered, even though technically domestic remedies have not been exhausted in the Turkish court system, because there is no Turkish court system that is recognisable as a system of law.

We now see the extraordinary conduct of the President in attacking Germany—one of the most civilised modern western democracies—for behaving like Nazi Germany. We are all used to hyperbole in political debate and to people in a hurry saying silly things, but for modern Germany, which is light-years away from the Germany of the 1930s, to be accused by this President of Turkey of behaving like Nazi Germany is beyond offensive. Indeed, the headline of yesterday’s editorial in The New York Times was “Mr. Erdogan’s Jaw-Dropping Hypocrisy”.

Journalists have been imprisoned and expelled from the country, and it seems the situation will not improve. I have seen Hansard reports from both this House and the other place in which Foreign Office Ministers say, “We constantly remind the Turkish Government or our counterparts of this, that and the other, and we are keeping the matter under review.” It is possible to exercise, as Mrs Merkel has done, proper diplomatic restraint without being guilty of pusillanimity. There is a proper distinction between pusillanimity and doing and saying very little apart from going through the form in order to preserve NATO and the help that Turkey is giving in relation to refugees, and to help the military position, as we want to keep an eye on Syria.

Let me finish by showing how ridiculous the situation currently is. It is ridiculous for an outside observer such as me, commenting in this way, but it is terrible for the innocent citizens of Turkey who may have different political or other views from the current Government and end up being imprisoned for it. As is clear now, Mr Erdogan wants to win his referendum, and no doubt he will. However, the situation has got to the ridiculous stage now where the Turkish news media have reported that the Government are worried enough about a victory for the no campaign that officials in Konya, a city in central Turkey, recently withdrew from circulation an anti-smoking pamphlet that contained the word “no”. A local Member of Parliament from Turkey’s governing party said the pamphlets had been recalled to avoid confusion, as reported by the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News. Mr Erdogan is further reported as saying to reporters that those who say no in the referendum will be siding with 15 July—the date of the attempted coup.

The situation in Turkey is very worrying, particularly for the people of Turkey. I hope the British Parliament will encourage the British Government to remember that there is a distinction between diplomatic restraint and pusillanimity.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—