A purged civil servant has discovered an entry on the web page of Turkey’s Constitutional Court that points to a possible predisposition against the cases of individuals dismissed from public service due to alleged links to the Gülen movement, which Turkey accuses of orchestrating a failed coup in 2016.
Levent Mazılıgüney, who used to be a public auditor until he became one of the victims of a widespread purge carried out by the Turkish government, made the revelation on Twitter where he shared a video of him using a search module on the court’s web page to look for information on an individual case and finding what appears to be a categorical instruction to reject all Gülen-related cases due to a lack of legal basis.
Further scanning on the website showed similar instructions for dismissed academics, soldiers, administrative officials and police officers as well as disbarred members of the judiciary, on the grounds of either lacking legal basis or failure to exhaust other remedies.
The Constitutional Court’s website was briefly shut down following Mazılıgüney’s revelations.
“For a long time, I was of the opinion that the Constitutional Court was not an effective domestic remedy and served no purpose other than misguiding the European Court of Human Rights [ECtHR] and international opinion by delivering showpiece rulings. Today, my suspicion was confirmed,” he tweeted.
After the attempted coup in 2016, the Turkish government sacked more than 150,000 public servants over real or perceived links to the Gülen movement or other groups it considers to be terrorist organizations.
Most of the dismissals and disbarments were carried out without due process.
The Constitutional Court, which expelled two of its own members, refused to assess the constitutionality of the government decree-laws that the dismissals were based upon.
The ECtHR has rejected thousands of individual applications from Turkey on the grounds that the applicants had not first exhausted domestic remedies.