Legalized in 1983, abortion had never been a hot-button issue in Turkish politics until May 25, 2012, when Prime Minister Erdoğan unexpectedly stated that he considered abortion as a murderous act, and that “no one should have a right to allow it.” These words, quickly taken up by others, initiated a fiery debate about reproductive health practices extending from abortion to c-sections and morning-after pills. While all members of the ruling Justice and Development Party who spoke up at the time, including Erdoğan himself, reiterated that abortion law would be altered to either restrict access to or delegalise abortion, throughout the two and a half years that have passed since, no concrete step has been taken in that direction. As a result, even though the legal status of abortion or any other fertility-related health practice has not formally altered, anticipation of legal change created ambiguity around these practices. Professional medical associations and women’s organizations report that abortion moved beyond the reach of many women in Turkey, not to mention other difficulties they come across as they seek control over their fertility. This paper explores how the ambiguity generated around the legal status of reproductive health services itself effectively regulates medical and social practices and attaches new meanings to them. In doing so, on the one hand, it analyses the ways that law ‘matters’ in the absence of any actual legal intervention, such as a legislative change or a lawsuit. On the other hand, it sheds light onto the ramifications of the struggles around reproductive health practices with respect to practices of democratic inclusion in Turkey, especially with regards to gender.

Scholars have noted the Turkish judiciary’s puzzling combination of fierce independence and statist authoritarianism. In this paper, I trace this paradox back to the early 1930s, when the single-party regime placed its formative legal thinkers in the difficult position of having to articulate doctrines both subservient to state leaders and representative of the new Republic’s identity as a Western country with independent courts, administrators, and academia. I focus in particular on the interwar work of Sıddık Sami Onar and Ali Fuad Başgil, law professors and alternating deans of the Faculty of Law at Istanbul University from the university purge in 1933 until the 1960s. Today Onar and Başgil are mainly remembered for being on opposite sides of the legalistic military coup in 1960, which brought the technocratic Onar to the apex of the state while Başgil, by then a liberal conservative, went into exile. However, before World War Two and the subsequent transition to democracy, Onar and Başgil were widely considered equals in their support of the single-party regime. To understand their significance for the legalistic character of Turkish authoritarianism, I compare their interwar writings both in terms of their theoretical content and in terms of how they reflexively deployed that content to position their own work within the field of the state. In particular, their responses to such transgressions as the 1937 Dersim massacres and the expansion of discretionary state powers with the onset of war in Europe reveal important contrasts in the role they assigned to jurisprudence in the exercise of public power. Başgil’s constitutional scholarship drew inspiration from Fascist legal theory to describe the state as a moral community constituted by its unreflexive loyalty to the “Leader.” In contrast, Onar took advantage of the praxis-oriented discipline of administrative law to develop an immanent critique of jurisdiction that made itself indispensable for the deployment of prerogative power. Onar’s methodology, I suggest, can best be described through a Deleuzian analytics of legal expressionism where theoretically informed state action constitutes its own ground without recourse to an extra-legal Leader. After the transition to democracy, therefore, Başgil’s quasi-Fascist work became irrelevant and outdated, while Onar’s technical and situational doctrine continued to resonate with the self-understanding of jurists, technocrats and army officers as the guardians of the rational interests of the nation-state, allowing an important strand of the authoritarian legalism of the 1930s to survive into the era of democracy.

Judges and prosecutors influence processes of violent conflict and peacebuilding through their decisions. This paper examines the Turkish judiciary’s response to the Kurdish conflict (1984-present). Although it is generally assumed that members of the legal profession tend to act on nationalist and militaristic premises, the specific ways in which ideology and professional concerns influence judicial decision-making need to be explored further. Through a close reading of important appellate court decisions as well as in-depth interviews with members of the legal profession, I argue that the interaction of violence and law in Turkey involves a complex set of motivations, constraints and outcomes. While the judges report being constrained by the political and physical realities of violent conflict, their own agency in shaping those conflict dynamics creates cannot be ignored.

In the aftermath of the 1980 military coup in Turkey, labor activism has been institutionally disempowered to such a degree that today, the unionized workers comprise only about eight percent of the workforce. In this repressive context, what does using human rights frameworks offer for activists in Turkey, in terms of providing remedies for labor rights violations and transforming labor activism on the ground? And what explains which groups within organized labor in Turkey use human rights law and discourse? In recent years, similar trends have arisen around the world, as labor activists have used human rights frameworks to draw attention to the precarious working conditions and restrictions on labor activism. While some scholars are enthusiastic about the prospects of this new alliance between human rights advocates and labor activists to renew focus on labor issues, others are skeptical of turning away from the traditional class-based strategies to individual rights-claiming before the courts. Yet, we lack a comparative study that carefully examines the effects of these rulings on the ground. Analyzing legal mobilization of labor activists at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), this research employs multiple methods to suggest that (a) the legal advocacy networks play a fundamental role in successfully using international frameworks and vernacularizing human rights law for local activists, (b) legal mobilization at the ECtHR has opened new discursive and strategic avenues that can be explored in other forms of labor activism, despite the limits of formal judicial remedies, (c) the strength of the organized labor and the ability to engage in mobilization efforts in multiple fronts determines the extent to which litigation efforts can be used as leverage at the domestic level by labor activists. The results of this research provides important information on strategies for labor activists and the remedies human rights courts provides for protecting the rights of aggrieved workers.