Turkey’s top judge warns against ‘new tutelage,’ deplores becoming ‘scapegoat’

The head of Turkey’s Constitutional Court, Haşim Kılıç, has deplored becoming the government’s scapegoat for the ruling overturning bans on Twitter and YouTube earlier this year, while warning that the once decried “judicial tutelage” has been replaced by a new one.

“The judiciary had been under a system of tutelage since 2010. New legal arrangements are being made to supposedly end this tutelage. But what’s now happening is a new tutelage, much more dangerous than the previous one,” the veteran judge was quoted as saying by daily Cumhuriyet Dec. 30 during a closed-door meeting at a think tank in Ankara.

The government has conducted a massive purge of the judiciary following the launch of two graft investigations last year that implicated four former ministers along with businessmen in charge of mega-projects, including Istanbul’s third airport, and known for their closeness with the government.

The then-prime minister, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, accused U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen’s movement of having established control in key positions in the judiciary and police through its followers, describing his influence as a “parallel structure” while justifying the purges as attempts to “end tutelage.”

But Kılıç denounced the methods used by the government to restructure the judiciary and questioned the intention of declaring the judicial institutions a new battleground. “Most of those arrangements are lacking of legality. The situation of the judiciary is quite bleak. There is great distress,” Kılıç said.

The latest chapter of the government’s self-proclaimed fight against a Gülenist network within the judiciary came with elections at the 22-member Supreme Council...