Before the Nov. 1 elections, Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş was arguing that their seats in Parliament would increase to 100. According...
The Temizöz Case, indeed, has not been a first in this regard. Recently, many court cases revolving around crimes committed by state officials in the 1990s have resulted in “not guilty” verdicts, and soldiers accused of crimes against humanity have been acquitted.
The “not guilty” verdict pronounced by the court in the JİTEM case, flying as it does in the face of a plethora of strongly incriminating evidence, violates my sense of justice, too, as it does for many others. Even if, as some would have it, these cases were started through the “Congregation’s desire to settle accounts” and then also paralyzed through their manipulations, they carried, and do carry, a fundamental, non-negligible significance.
In the past, the AKP announced a policy of “zero tolerance for torture” to take a great step on the road to a state of law. Today, too, it should announce a policy of “zero tolerance for lawlessness” in order to prevent such unjust outcomes to cases that have truly wounded public conscience.