The Association of Judges and Prosecutors (YARSAV), the first nongovernmental organization of judiciary members in Turkey, was dissolved and its chairman landed behind bars after the July 15 coup attempt. Following the closure order, part of the first emergency-rule decree issued soon after the putsch, the Justice Ministry sent letters of the international bodies to which YARSAV was a member, asking them to admit as its replacement a group with ties to the government. The move is yet another example of Ankara’s tactic of disabling critical institutions and replacing them with pro-government ones.
YARSAV’s case is especially ironic in light of how the association was founded and functioned. It was created in 2006, at a time when followers of Fethullah Gulen, the accused mastermind of the putsch, were increasingly taking hold of senior positions in the judiciary, taking advantage of the then-close alliance between Gulen and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The 500 founding judges and prosecutors sought to get organized precisely against this trend of partisan staffing. YARSAV filed numerous lawsuits against appointments by the Justice Ministry, secured the cancelation of several regulations and guidelines on the grounds that they facilitated partisan staffing, and ensured that job interviews were recorded on camera. It was among the first vocal critics of mass probes and trials targeting mainly soldiers but also intellectuals and politicians over an alleged plot to unseat the government that the AKP would later admit was a setup by Gulenist police and judicial members to defang the military.
