Turkey's new legal definitions lead to increase in arrests
A new legal provision to facilitate police action against government opponents in Turkey has victimized scores of people in a short period of time.
Rattled by the Gezi Park protests in 2013 and further frightened by street unrest with the Kurdish riots over Kobani in October, Turkey’s government has facilitated detentions and pretrial arrests through a legal amendment that removed the criteria of “strong suspicion” and “substantial evidence” and replaced them with “reasonable suspicion.” The amendment has led to thousands of detentions or pretrial arrests in a short period of time.
In fact, it was the same government that had introduced the “strong suspicion” clause instead of “reasonable suspicion” in February 2014 to prevent arrests in corruption investigations that targeted ministers and government cronies. However, soon things changed. As the Gulen community became the target of police operations, the government again amended the provision and reintroduced the “reasonable suspicion” clause.
The amended law, which took effect on Dec. 12, allows police to target suspects on the grounds of “reasonable suspicion,” search their compounds, confiscate their belongings and detain them. Police can now get a court ruling that they have acted on grounds of “reasonable suspicion” 24 hours after a given operation.
Jurists contacted by Al-Monitor commented that the “reasonable suspicion” clause exists also in European countries and that the problem lies not in the clause itself but in the absence of any definition of what “reasonable” means. Instead of making an objective legal definition, the decision on what constitutes a “reasonable" suspicion is left to the police.
