CHP Istanbul Provincial Chair Dr. Canan Kaftancıoğlu, undergoing prosecution for her social media posts with her imprisonment for up to seventeen years sought, has appeared before the judges. The hearing was adjourned until 6 September.
CHP Istanbul Provincial Chair Dr. Canan Kaftancıoğlu, undergoing prosecution for her social media posts with her imprisonment for up to seventeen years sought, has appeared before the judges. The hearing was adjourned until 6 September.
The hearing started at 10 am today before Istanbul Serious Crime Court No 37 situated at the Istanbul Judicial Complex in Çağlayan of the trial in which CHP Istanbul Provincial Chair Dr. Canan Kaftancıoğlu is being prosecuted for certain social media posts she made in 2011 and 2012. The hearing was adjourned until 6 September 2019.
The hearing prosecutor read out his recommendation on Canan Kaftancıoğlu. The prosecutor sought the cumulative sentencing of defendant Kaftancıoğlu to between four years and ten months’ and seventeen years’ imprisonment on the counts of “defamation of the president,” “defamation of public servants,” “insulting the state of the Republic of Turkey and the state’s military and police organizations,” “publicly inciting popular animosity and enmity” and “making armed terrorist organization propaganda.”
Canan Kaftancıoğlu, on pretrial release, and her nearly fifty lawyers attended the hearing whose second session was heard before Istanbul Serious Crime Court No 37. Lawyers for the presidency, in turn, were present in the capacity of complainant. Large numbers of MPs and citizens who had come to support Canan Kaftancıoğlu filled the courtroom.
The presiding judge stated that the recusal application submitted at the previous session had been dismissed by Istanbul Serious Crime Court No 1 and, in response, this decision had been objected to by the defendant’s counsel. Subsequently, lawyers making submissions on behalf of ten people with close connections to the 15 July fallen and martyrs and MHP Central Administrative Board member Ahmet Yiğit Yıldırım applied to intervene. Kaftancıoğlu's counsel sought the dismissal of the applications to intervene on the grounds that they had suffered no direct injury from the crime. The court bench granted the application with regard to the offence of “inciting popular animosity and enmity” on the grounds that it was possible they had suffered injury.
Following the hearing, Kaftancıoğlu said, “On seeing the proceedings once more, I can laughingly say, on seeing that the prosecutor’s recommendation was ready in CD form without even taking account of the evidence or the applications to expand the scope of the trial, a poem by the master Nâzım came to mind” and she read the following lines, “You are not even a full stop in this fight, you are a small, twisted comma, a miserable conduit. Can I vent my ire at you? You, too, know that I am not wont to swear at a postal courier, a slave to orders; to beat his lacky in anger at his master.”
Canan Kaftancıoğlu arrived at the judicial complex to applause and the chanting of “rights, law and justice.” In the statement she made here, Kaftancıoğlu said, “Everything has come out just fine and everything will stay fine.”
The hearing started with Kaftancıoğlu's arrival in the courtroom.
Kaftancıoğlu submitted her defence as follows:
“I came into the world as the child of a poor family in a village in Ordu. I came to terms at an early age with the reality that the sole route out of the life that was imposed on me and those like me was study and struggle. I embarked on the fight for rights, law and justice in my childhood. Because my conditions forced me to do so. And, dictated by this necessity, as I studied and lived, I cloaked myself in left-wing values never again to divest myself of them. I have forever remained true to what my childhood homeland taught me, what it whispered into my ear while running along muddy village roads, and to that venerable dream of humanity, the dream of equality, freedom and fraternity. All the values that have developed forged by time and location but have not changed and which I believe in and advocate have forever been my life-shaping roadmap and compass. I hope and wish that within the ambit of freedom of thought and expression I will be able to leave this courtroom without suffering a blatant rights violation in the view of the whole world on account of my social, political and humanitarian social media posts that I made with no criminal intent and purpose while contemplating current events and circumstances that pained us as a society and without making any discrimination and each of which encapsulates indescribable pain.
I hope it will be possible, confronting those who have not the least respect for a politician’s freedom of thought and expression and launch a lynching campaign with public power and resources, to say, ‘So be it – there are those who merit the title judge in Istanbul!’ This hope and wish of mine is on behalf of the millions who believe in the supremacy of the law but refuse to be crushed under the law of the supreme and who will also struggle within the bounds of the law, rather than myself. I am a doctor who has engaged in the human rights struggle, for example having compiled a thesis in this matter so as to give guidance to courts and doctors at a time when there was not much mention of torture in either juristics or medicine. In this struggle, I have argued unwaveringly that the most basic right of all living beings is the right to life, and freedom of thought and expression and such painful realities as domestic violence and child abuse have been matters I have forever concerned myself with and argued about. In conjunction with these values and principles that I advocate, I have been in active politics, being CHP Assistant Provincial Chair in the years 2011-2012, Deputy Provincial Chair in 12-14, Party Assembly Member in 16-18 and as Istanbul Provincial Chair since January 2018. Since the first day on which I was elected Provincial Chair I have suffered a horrific or indeed not easily bearable smear campaign fuelled with lies and slander that also includes my family. The paving stones of today actually began to be laid with these attacks and threats that were made consciously and deliberately. However, life teaches people to walk without tripping over those stones. We are currently at the point to which those who targeted me personally the very next day after I was elected Provincial Chair and insinuated order-like, ‘You’ll pay the price’ with me in mind have brought us
It is most curious that I am elected Provincial Chair on 13 January. Things are launched with jet speed on 15 January. What a coincidence that the President makes a complaint on the same day and this is speedily included in the investigation file. Investigation permission is granted on 22 May immediately prior to the 24 June 2018 presidential elections and the indictment is put together in the run-up to the 23 June election and it is accepted in five days. And the first hearing is on 28 June one day after the certificate of election. Today on 18 July we are all together once more. Listing one after the other the speed at which proceedings are moving, their manner and more importantly their dates, this is significant from the point of view of showing the political nature of the judicial proceedings in question.
Let us come to seven years ago. With what I wrote while also being in active politics in those years not being deemed a crime, its being branded a ‘crime’ today and the commencement of the vile attacks against me after having been elected Provincial Chair speak volumes. For just these reasons this trial is a punitive trial. It is the trial to penalize a provincial chair who has set out to give Istanbul back to the people. This trial is the result of a juristic mindset of a judicial system fashioned with the rulers in mind and which defines crime and criminal in terms of opposition or not to the ruling party. Mark my words, this mindset is victimizing you as much as us.
What is my supposed crime tool? Not cannons, rifles and guns. Tweets I posted seven years ago, that is, my social media posts. If you perceive the words of that moment to be vital words and set out to interpret them years later, you will be unable to set eyes on any other defendants in these courtrooms in the country apart from the millions who conveyed their feelings and words of that moment on social media. With it not even possible to comment on people and ideas looking at words compressed into 140 characters in those years, I also leave the initiative as to prosecution and indeed serious crime prosecution in your hands. In a period in which all citizens were engaging in citizenship journalism, it was my most basic right and duty to express my thoughts as a politician and citizen while confronted by social events. Additionally, the charges laid on the basis of words cherry picked stretching back a full seven years from out of the hundreds and thousands of words spoken due to the painful truths of that moment is nothing more than the penalizing of a success.
Just at it is nobody’s right to insult that office that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk filled and slight that office, they dare not, either. Be they who they may. Including those who fill this office. Defamation of the president was based on the principle of his or her independent and constitutionally guaranteed supreme representational status in which he or she is impartial, taking into consideration the President’s being representational of the state and his or her duties and powers set out in the Constitution. Examination of the Presidential Oath which the President takes before parliament before entering office reveals that the President vows to be impartial and perform his or her duties impartially. It is a known truth that the President has revealed to the public countless times that he does not act in accordance with this constitutional oath and public acceptance and, indeed, is not impartial. It must be recalled that the 16 April 2016 referendum led to the institution of a “party-affiliated President” giving institutional form to the partial presidency that had actually been in de facto existence. With this in mind, it is a fact that the CHP took every opportunity to implore him to be impartial in view of the institutional nature and social esteem of this constitutional office the President represents. For the President, who I unwaveringly believe should be impartial before the entirety of 82 million citizens, to even assume party status in courtrooms gives rise to distress for the law and my country rather than just for me.
The person who is President is at the same time the general chair of a political party. An unlawful process is being operated whereby even political criticism directed at the AKP General Chair is thrust within the ambit of defaming the president. The President cannot be said to have suffered any injury or his political identity or career to have been affected on account of my tweets. Moreover, calling for a politician to be prosecuted is not defamation, either. In any case, his excellency the President has sued me for damages in respect of a number of these tweets. If there is indeed any injury, he will surely secure compensation if he wins these cases. I made recourse to my rights to political satire and criticism and my freedom of thought and expression with reference to the President’s partial political identity as AKP General Chair and his practices that I do not find to be correct. My posts are not posts due to his being President and premised on statutory and administrative procedures he has conducted in this capacity or statements he has made.
In my tweets, I made recourse mindful of this distinction to freedom of thought and expression as a concerned citizen, a doctor capable of feeling the pain of others and a woman capable of crying at the pain of others in criticizing the party-oriented, ideological and polarizing political understanding and approaches that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan employs in the capacity of AKP General Chair and in objecting loudly to this ideological and polarizing political language and style.
It is widely accepted in democratic societies that politicians and party chairs are obliged to tolerate harsher criticism than other people. The conclusions to emerge from many judicial and European Court of Human Rights rulings also vindicate me in what I say. It is common knowledge that freedom of expression is protected in the widest manner in the realm of political debate and in matters of public policy concern. Comments having the nature of political criticism must not be deemed defamation or a violation of personal rights and there must be equal tolerance of criticism as of applause.
Who could I have ruffled and why by calling Fetullah Gülen deranged at a time when members of the ruling party were lining up for appointments to toady up to him calling him the ‘scholarly gentleman’ and to whom they had gifted all the state’s resources? Who could I have ruffled by calling Fetullah Gülen, who was diagnosed as having a psychotic disorder in 1981 at the Cerrahpaşa Medical Faculty Psychiatric Department and who is known only to have finished primary school, deranged?
As this tweet also reveals, if you live and conduct politics informed by your values, principles and ideology there is no contradiction in what you say and argue despite the passage of years. I have neither defamed any public servant on account of their duties, nor made any concrete imputation that might tarnish their esteem. As well as being the child of a teacher who served in a small place in Anatolia, I am a doctor who has performed public service in Anatolia. I am well familiar with the esteem of public duty and how this esteem is to be preserved and its importance. No typical component of crime is to be sought, and will not be found if sought, in the turning by me of actual events and circumstances that arose indignation in society into social media posts having the nature and character of criticism and sometimes severe criticism. And, again, what I said had no negative impact on the said public servants’ lives and did not impede their duties. It must be recalled that political folk hold to account from a political viewpoint having taken the people’s pulse, can make severe criticism that is sometimes harsh in nature and this must be deemed to fall within the scope of freedom of thought and expression.
There cannot and must not be anything more natural than our loud opposition as the CHP to the AKP’s ideological road maps to which it makes reference in its political programme and its political practices that we do not think are correct. If I loudly voice my rejection of attempted historical and social polarization based on our General Chair’s or others’ faith identity, Berkin Elvan's life being taken from him in childhood or Hrant Dink's murder and the unlawful procedures subsequently enacted, this is the exercising of a right that has a hundred degree counterpart in the context of pluralistic democracy and freedoms.
Those in power cannot and must not decide from a patrimonial viewpoint what young girls will and will not wear and how many children women are to bear or the manner in which they are to do so. I and we must not be expected either as the Republican People’s Party or as CHP Provincial Chair or as the mother of a daughter to remain silent personally and institutionally over such interference in personal life. It is inconceivable for me as a doctor who embodies the enlightened attainments of Ataturk’s Turkey and the Republic and as a provincial chair in a position of responsibility in the CHP which established the Republic to belittle the state in a public or veiled manner. My words were not to belittle the state but, on the contrary, to prevent those who fill those posts from robbing the state of prestige and belittling it in the national and international arena with their actions or non-actions. If you ask me those authorized to represent the state are far more duty bound not to belittle the state and tarnish its prestige than citizens.
On examination of my posts, my questioning and performing my public and human duty over the non-solving of political murders that have been concealed for years and the attempt is still made to conceal and the failure for the culprits to be prosecuted, also the murder of Hrant Dink who had said, ‘They do not shoot doves in this country,’ the lack of holding to account of the murderers of Berkin Elvan who was killed in his childhood and the political whitewashing of ministers who were mired in all manner of bribery and corruption despite their manifest crimes that had come into the open cannot be subjected to prosecution and cannot be branded a crime. It is not I who should be investigated and prosecuted, but the person or people I mentioned a little earlier. My posts that are alleged to be crimes fall within the scope of freedom of thought and expression.
As one who for my entire life have fought against animosity and enmity in the human rights struggle and have acted and lived accordingly, this charge is one of the most comical charges against me (inciting popular animosity and enmity). The tweets I penned given that I did not consider the AKP General Chair’s political viewpoint towards children, youth, women and different ethnic and faith groups to be correct, I found the ideological insensitivity towards deaths in childhood to be disturbing, I had publicly exposed the effort and ideal of raising a vindictive generation, I thought there were many unknowns that needed to be uncovered surrounding the 15 July coup and I was unable legally or morally to accept those who attempted lynching in the street out of ideological incitement and not democratic concerns fall within the scope of freedom of thought and expression. There can be nothing more comprehensible than me reacting as a human rights advocate to those who publicly and with great audacity end human life regardless of what their crime is.
Every circumstance brought about contrary to the will of the people and in which countless innocent people are killed and injured is a coup. Coming to terms with coups requires them to be assessed along with their causes and consequences and ensuring that whoever was to blame is prosecuted. This coup is not a thing to be glossed over speaking of ‘a gift of God to us,’ by ‘paving the road leading to the coup’ despite all warnings made by us or, and I say this grieving for the countless innocent people who died or were injured in the coup attempt, by instrumentalizing it for political gains as in this courtroom.
Both those who paved the road leading to the coup and those who carried out the coup and also those who operate coup law are guilty and responsible and should stand to account before the law. As one who has made a profession of preserving life not killing and who celebrates life not death, I have defended and will continue to defend life and preserving life in all areas of my life. I have always fought and will henceforth fight those who celebrate death and rob people of their lives not for the future of society and citizenry but just for their own futures. With the tweets at issue in the charges having reached a maximum of twenty to thirty people given the number of my followers, likes and posts in those years, did any concrete fact or event occur indicative of public security being breached in a manner that posed a clear, existing and proximate threat due to these posts? What concrete components of crime were encountered of incitement in a severe and intense manner to animosity and enmity due to these tweets? What is the basis for the issue of my engaging in actions informed by feelings of hatred of an intensity that calls for the taking of revenge in which I by contemplation and design caused injury to the object of my personal enmity? Does ascribing culpability from an initially prejudiced standpoint, without taking account of the criteria of “clear, existing and proximate threat” that distinguishes freedom of expression from this type of dangerous crime, point to the existence of the offence of smearing committed against me? All these comments of mine fall within the scope of freedom of expression. Just as the freedom of expression of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was sent to prison twenty years ago for a poem, was defended, my right to freedom of expression must also be defended today.
An entirely bad-faith judicial engineering exercise has taken place aimed at robbing the Republican People’s Party of public esteem and ensuring that terrorist organizations come to mind along with the CHP’s institutional identity and myself. The tweet I penned in connection with three women whose names I learnt following a brutal murder in common with the public at large in the solution process period has nothing to do with terrorist organization propaganda. If it is impossible to for us say to Erdoğan that he is a communist or is making communist propaganda for reading and posting a Nâzım Hikmet poem, the same situation applies to my social media posts, too. The extrajudicial killing of the three women mentioned, regardless of their crimes, is unacceptable in either legal or humanitarian terms. I, too, as a right to life advocate, criticized these murders for factual and principled reasons in the tweet I penned. Regardless of their crime, everyone’s right to life and a trial should be under state and statutory guarantee. “Ending a person’s life so brutally is very bad, very ugly and is veritable brutality. I truly wish to state that I feel sorrow.” These words are attributable to Deputy Prime Minister of the day Bülent Arınç.
The right to freedom of expression should be applied to everyone equally. The insistent and persistent wish to thrust this post of mine within the ambit of criminality has become a logic-defying approach. It is clear that no crime is involved in quoting in inverted commas a comment by a murdered person and condemning this extrajudicial killing. How can it be said that this post portrays as being legitimate, praises or encourages an illegal organization’s methods incorporating force, violence or duress? This allegation is as comical and absurd an affair as courts in the past ascribing membership of terrorist organizations to figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin.
I have membership of two organizations. One is my professional organization of which I am honoured to be a member, while the other is the Republican People’s Party organization of which I am proud to be the head in Istanbul.
There was clearly a situation in the past, in a climate in which there were those who did not respect citizen’s fundamental rights and freedoms, their ethnic and faith identities or even their right to life, there were those who committed constitutional crimes using all means and there were those who in a bold and partisan manner made the state’s public authority serve their personal and party interests, in which those who took refuge in the law of the supreme not the supremacy of the law entered the positions that you currently fill.
There were prosecutors whose statues were supposedly going to be erected. Where are they now? Remember. There were judges in the conspiracy trials who ruled in accordance with orders and instructions and not the law. Where are they now? Remember. There were those who tried victims of the law who were certified as being innocent having died in prison. Where are they now? Remember. There were provincial governors who sprayed gas on citizens. Where are they now? Remember. There were police chiefs who, while duty bound to ensure our safety, were involved in murders. Where are they now? Remember. The only way not to go through what we remember is to take refuge in the law and just the law. And I, as one of the founders of the Social Memory Platform, am duty bound to remind you of this.
You must decide. Are we to live as individuals complying with the principles and realities of the democratic social order based on equal citizenship and the Republic’s enlightened attainments, or are we to live as slaves of an authoritarian regime in which the notion of rights and law of all kinds is left to the political power’s preferences and initiative and in which thinking and expression are subject to all manner of blunt and disproportionate sanctions? Never mind a woman, a doctor, a politician and a mother who tries unwaveringly to internalize the rules of universal human rights, considers the supremacy of the law to be indispensable and never abandons the dream of equality, freedom and fraternity without betraying the Republic’s enlightened attainments, I prefer to be a fully conscionable and honourable person and remain a person.
I have said that a dream brought me here to this courtroom. And I know that I am not the first person to be tried because of their dreams, but I hope I will be the last. I will also struggle for this.”
With pretrial messages of support coming for Kaftancıoğlu from the Saturday Mothers, Gezi families, arts world people, trade unionists and politicians, Kaftancıoğlu urged people on her social media account to go to the Gezi Park trial in Silivri instead of her own trial.
Prior to Kaftancıoğlu’s trial in which her imprisonment for between four years and ten months and seventeen years is sought, messages of support came from figures who have lent weight to the struggle for human rights in Turkey like Fadime Göktepe, Emine Ocak, Sami Elvan, Emel Korkmaz and Akın Birdal.
Fadime Göktepe, mother of our newspaper’s reporter who was murdered in custody, Metin Göktepe, said in her message she posted on Twitter, “What did Canan do? Did she murder a person? Take your hands off Canan. Canan is a pal.”
Emine Ocak, mother of Hasan Ocak who went missing in custody, called for solidarity, saying, “We won’t leave you alone, Canan.”
With Sami Elvan, father of Berkin Elvan who was killed in Okmeydanı during the Gezi actions, saying, “It is now our turn with Canan Kaftancıoğlu who was always at our side and never spared us her support. We will be at the Çağlayan Judicial Complex,” for his part, Human Rights Association former Chair Akın Birdal said, “Canan Kaftancıoğlu has been an unbroken human rights and peace advocate since the Shared Memory Platform. Now Kaftancıoğlu is not alone.”
In turn, Emel Korkmaz, mother of Ali İsmail Korkmaz who was murdered in Eskişehir at the time of the Gezi actions, commented as follows: “People who are striving for some things to go well in this country and for this country’s future cannot be prosecuted. Canan Kaftancıoğlu cannot be prosecuted for a tweet. We are forever at her side. Canan Kaftancıoğlu is not alone.”
Among those supporting Canan Kaftancıoğlu was Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu.
İmamoğlu said in a message he posted on his Twitter account, “Canan Kaftancıoğlu is both my and millions of my party members’ trusted road companion. She is a good mother, a good wife, a good doctor and a good friend. I am personally acquainted with her love for the country and the people. My greatest wish is for her to leave Çağlayan with a result in which the sense of justice is not wounded.”
HDP Mardin Metropolitan Co-Mayor Ahmet Türk, for his part, declared, “Canan Kaftancıoğlu is an individual who believes in democracy, is struggling for a democratic future and defends freedoms. Today she has been singled out. Let everyone know that we are on the side of those who engage in the democracy struggle.” (EVRENSEL DAILY)
(Translated by Tim DRAYTON)
Ceren Sözeri
Yusuf Karadaş
Aras Coşkuntuncel