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"... a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconsti

"... a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional." Your takeaways: 1) Turkey has a Constitutional Court. 2) Turkey has a constitution. 3) The court makes rulings and they are carried out. 4) Erdogan did something and it was "checked" and "balanced." Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such. Courts always take a while to catch up, just like e.g. investigations and pretty much every process governed by facts. But yeah, cause for some optimism. Lot of yelling here today about the block - guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court.

hinkley 7y ago
I'm just relieved it was due to a legal maneuver within Turkey instead of a concession from the WikiMedia Foundation.
tokai 7y ago
Makes sense why Ergodan is attacking the court system. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/un-urged-to-act-over-purge-of-turkeys-lawyers-by-erdogan https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/un-urged-to-ac...
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  He's destroying the other side completely, whether they are lawyers or government janitors. But in theory courts and military can stop him. He purged the military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%93present_purges_in_Turkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%93present_purges_in... so it's just the court now. Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while.
  - duck2 7y ago
    It's more complicated than that. The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them, often exerting power for the cult's interests[0] and topping off with the coup attempt in 2016. In turn, the religious cult was allowed (by Erdoğan, with the 2010 referendum) to colonize the military and the judicial system because previously they were colonized by hardliner modernists who had a history of doing coups or closing down political parties when someone they don't like come to power, and explicitly threatened Erdoğan[1][2]. [0]: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ex-exam-chief-indicted-over-feto-ties-150451 http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ex-exam-chief-indicted-over... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Justice_and_Development_Party_closure_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Justice_and_Development_P... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-memorandum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-memorandum
    - martin_a 7y ago
      That "coup" was merely a staged action. Can't tell me a real coup is over in like three hours and nothing happened. Sounds an awful lot like the german "Reichtagsbrand" which led to political cleanings and more.
    - akie 7y ago
      > The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them Ok, just so we're clear on this: that's ridiculous nonsense, conspiracy theories basically, but you're using it to justify the indefensible actions of a hard-line authoritarian ruler.
      - chalst 7y ago
        While I wouldn't call the Gulenist movement a cult, they certainly engaged in conspiracies. The irony was that their infiltration into the army and civil service was supported by Erdoğan earlier, as a counterweight to the Kemalist establishment. Turkey is the country that the term "deep state" was coined to describe. I don't know what to believe about the so-called coup.
        zzuko 7y ago
        Gulenist movement was certainly a cult, I live in Turkey and been to one of their school. I have the first-hand experience of their brainwashing methods and Gulenist indoctrination.
        woodpanel 7y ago
        To me it always seemed like Gulen is the most internationally interviewed Turk for criticisms on Erdogan, whilst his own ideology doesn't seem so "modern" as well. Would really appreciate If you could explain what Gulenism is about and particular where it differs from the Erdoganian Muslim Brotherhood ideology.
      - Kaiyou 7y ago
        Didn't the same thing happen in South Korea with the Prime Minister being a puppet of some cult or such? What he says doesn't sound far-fetched, just unsubstantiated at this point.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >But in theory courts and military can stop him. The voters can also stop him. Instead, Turkish voters not only re-elected him multiple times, they even voted in one special election to give him even more power. The Turkish people are getting the government they've voted for. >Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while. Yes, but what can you do when a nation of people democratically decide to give someone absolute power? If you try to prevent this, then you're working against democracy.
    - furbyhater 7y ago
      It's not that simple. Erdogan massively repressed his rivals, such as the parties representing the Kurdish part of the population and their sympathizers (HDP) and the whole Gülen movement, not to mention the young movement protesting in the Gezi Park a few years ago. So we cannot pretend that the elections held were fair and open, e.g. the results aren't representative of the entire population of Turkey.
      - magduf 7y ago
        Results of any election are never representative of the entire population. That's the nature of democracy. If you have 99.999% of the population voting for the same person (like in Saddam's Iraq), then it's obvious the election was a sham. Democracy is all about the majority getting to choose the leaders. As for repression, Erdogan didn't do that all by himself. Autocrats like that persist because they have a power structure under them that supports them and keeps them in power. In a democratic country like Turkey, this is supported by the people voting to keep these power structures in place. In short, the majority of the people there do support him. Yeah, it sucks that he repressed minorities, but that's one of the dangers of democracy: if the majority doesn't care about protecting minorities and their civil rights, then the minorities get stomped on. The only thing that makes a democratic system better than a completely autocratic system (like North Korea) is that at least in the democracy, there's a chance the majority will protect the minorities, and whatever institutions have been built in the system of government to do so and prevent leaders from having too much power. But as Turkey shows, and also in Germany in the 1930s, it sometimes falls apart, mainly because the people allow it to.
agumonkey 7y ago
honest question: is it a first / new or was it already the case before ?
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Already the case I'm sure... I'm displaying my ignorance a bit!
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  This is neither new nor first. Turkey has a court tradition that spans, at this point, more than seven hundred years (excluding Eastern Roman law with Corpus Iuris Civilis, which if included would bring it to 2500, an unbroken chain from whence it came, Rome) - to the point that it customarily allowed every sub-nation of the Ottoman Empire to have their own court and apply their own laws. For example, if you were Christian, you would get Christian judges, a Muslim would get the Muslim court and a Jewish person would likewise. It worked well for a long time, and when it didn’t, the modern, current court system was put in place. The general point here is that, no, Turkey is not, in fact, a banana republic, but ultimately a pretty normal enlightenment-ideas-based country which is dealing with a leader that tries to stretch everything it can find to give himself more unrestrained power. That should unfortunately be pretty familiar to people who live in the US at this point.
  - Uehreka 7y ago
    While we’re talking history: I’ve heard that the system of laws codified under Justinian in the Byzantine empire ended up forming the basis for most Western law systems to this day. My math is probably off here, but is the current Turkish court system a continuous descendant from that system?
    - rolleiflex 7y ago
      That's why I left it separate under an asterisk. Not an expert, but I think what happened is that Emperor Justinian's code remained the base for the Christian law within the Empire until the modernisation, which was pretty much a merge of that tradition with updates pulled from French third republic with the exception of civil law, which was merged in from Switzerland instead. Up until 1851 the largest minority in the Empire were Muslims at 45% of the population, followed by Christians at 35%. You could argue that it's an unbroken lineage because 35% of the population still followed Roman law which was still valid and in full force, or you could argue that the most populous minority didn't, therefore a broken lineage. In either case, the reality is more shades of grey, of course: all jurisdictions of accepted law evolved side by side with some crosstalk over time. Ultimately though, Turkey terminated the application of muslim law, removed it entirely from its code and completely switched to a western code after World War I, roughly coincident with the collapse of the Empire and the foundation of the current, modern Republic. It's subject to both European Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights as the ultimate courts of appeal, both of which, I believe, have some presiding Turkish judges. (My knowledge in this field is very superficial — if someone knows better, please feel free to correct!)
turtlesdown11 7y ago
>Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such. Beautiful strawman here. Let's let Turkey go on denying genocide, murdering Kurds, destabilizing the region, and arresting political opponents and holding them without charges, because gosh darn it, they let wikipedia in.
- decafbad 7y ago
  Most western people are really that ignorant to think our security forces choose who to kill by ethnicity, right? I'm starting to believe this.
afterburner 7y ago
> Lot of yelling here today about the block - guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court. Sure, after 2.5 years. And after being blocked in the first place.
- ska 7y ago
  These sorts of court cases are rarely resolved quickly in any country that I know of. It seems easy from the outside, but it isn't.
  - darkmarmot 7y ago
    The primary difference lies in execution. Most countries would err on the side of permitting the site to continue to operate, as with an injunction in the U.S. Here, it was effectively treated "guilty until proven innocent".
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Do you have examples of country-wide blocks that were eventually lifted by the courts aside from this one?
  - afterburner 7y ago
    In a freer country massive and immediate public uproar would have roasted hundreds of political careers and caused fast action at the top. In an even freer country, it would not have happened in the first place. What am I supposed to be impressed by?
sdinsn 7y ago
> guys it was lifted After 2.5 years... Let's not pretend like this is some major success. It's a failure by all accounts that luckily ended up OK.
- vunie 7y ago
  Compared to illegal mass surveillance programs that remain running to this day, and a witty intelligence head who remains free after lying under oath, this is a shinning success that should be celebrated. Hopefully other nations follow their lead one day.
  - Twixes 7y ago
    Turkish authorities don't have global tech giants to tap into, but worry not, they're monitoring the internet very closely. In fact, they arrest people over tweets criticizing their rule. [0] And of course they block Wikipedia country–wide, over what Donald Trump would call "fake news" (as he does with news outlets revealing embarrassing facts about him or his administration). Not an example to be followed by any government on Earth. [0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/03/27/turkey-crackdown-social-media-posts https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/03/27/turkey-crackdown-social-...
    - remcob 7y ago
      I think grandparent was not about having surveillance programs or not, but about whether the government is being held accountable to it's own laws. A quality that is worryingly slipping in several nations. Hence the emphasis on 'illegal' and the shoddy investigation with little follow-up.
    - RaceWon 7y ago
      > Donald Trump would call "fake news" (as he does with news outlets revealing embarrassing facts about him or his administration). CNN is fake news. Period... there no debate about this fact. Their agenda, their reporting and most importantly their bent--is totally one sided. Unless of course President Trump is Actually A Plant that Putin Knew Would win the election despite Never winning Any other office--a feat which had never been done before. Tulsi is also a "Russian Asset", just ask Hillary... And here I was thinking she was a Patriot who served in a War Zone. Free your mind. The Matrix Has You... :)
LudwigNagasena 7y ago
That's because Turkey, like Russia, is a hybrid regime, it is not a pure autocracy.
yostrovs 7y ago
Some things, such as freedom of speech, I believe are universal and a government should need a very good reason to restrict some aspects of it. Therefore, access to Wikipedia should have been allowed to continue while the case was being run through the courts, as a point to be on the side of assuming the best for freedom.
sedatk 7y ago
More than 300,000 websites are still blocked in Turkey, just to put this in context. Also it's quite naive to assume that lifting the ban wasn't the government's intention, just days before European Court of Human Right's deadline to oversee the case.
- dmos62 7y ago
  This gives an idea of what kind of sites were blocked at the end of 2019: https://explorer.ooni.org/search?test_name=web_connectivity&probe_cc=TR&since=2019-11-01&until=2020-01-01&only=anomalies https://explorer.ooni.org/search?test_name=web_connectivity&...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
billfruit 7y ago
But court could have stayed the block till it finished arguing the case, but it didn't. It let the block be for 2.5 years, while it made up its mind. To my eye it is problematic that.
- sedatk 7y ago
  Because they finally reached the deadline before ECHR takes over and they don't want EU to be involved.
stale2002 7y ago
> guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court. It took 2 and half years for this to happen. That does not sound like a nation of laws to me. Imagine if this happened in America. Would you be making apologist arguments, in that situation?
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  US seems like have it's own style, like the pursuit of Jullian Assange and shutdown of Lavabit. You could argue that it's worse . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
  - stale2002 7y ago
    I am not sure why people in this thread are so quick to try and defend people who shutdown websites, and important information. You don't have to defend them. Just say that they did a bad thing and call it a day.
hyko 7y ago
Turkey may be a high functioning autocracy, but it’s still just an autocracy. We’ll continue to call it out as such.
erfgh 7y ago
You know that he has sent hundreds of judges to prison, right? Some of them were arrested on the bench. This decision should read "Erdogan orders the Constitutional Court to restore access to Wikipedia".
woodandsteel 7y ago
Erdogan's program of turning Turkey into an authoritarian, Islamic society is proceeding in steps, and he has not yet fully taken over the courts.

hinkley 7y ago

I'm just relieved it was due to a legal maneuver within Turkey instead of a concession from the WikiMedia Foundation.

tokai 7y ago

Makes sense why Ergodan is attacking the court system. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/un-urged-to-act-over-purge-of-turkeys-lawyers-by-erdogan https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/un-urged-to-ac...

onetimemanytime 7y ago
He's destroying the other side completely, whether they are lawyers or government janitors. But in theory courts and military can stop him. He purged the military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%93present_purges_in_Turkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%93present_purges_in... so it's just the court now. Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while.
- duck2 7y ago
  It's more complicated than that. The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them, often exerting power for the cult's interests[0] and topping off with the coup attempt in 2016. In turn, the religious cult was allowed (by Erdoğan, with the 2010 referendum) to colonize the military and the judicial system because previously they were colonized by hardliner modernists who had a history of doing coups or closing down political parties when someone they don't like come to power, and explicitly threatened Erdoğan[1][2]. [0]: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ex-exam-chief-indicted-over-feto-ties-150451 http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ex-exam-chief-indicted-over... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Justice_and_Development_Party_closure_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Justice_and_Development_P... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-memorandum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-memorandum
  - martin_a 7y ago
    That "coup" was merely a staged action. Can't tell me a real coup is over in like three hours and nothing happened. Sounds an awful lot like the german "Reichtagsbrand" which led to political cleanings and more.
  - akie 7y ago
    > The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them Ok, just so we're clear on this: that's ridiculous nonsense, conspiracy theories basically, but you're using it to justify the indefensible actions of a hard-line authoritarian ruler.
    - chalst 7y ago
      While I wouldn't call the Gulenist movement a cult, they certainly engaged in conspiracies. The irony was that their infiltration into the army and civil service was supported by Erdoğan earlier, as a counterweight to the Kemalist establishment. Turkey is the country that the term "deep state" was coined to describe. I don't know what to believe about the so-called coup.
      - zzuko 7y ago
        Gulenist movement was certainly a cult, I live in Turkey and been to one of their school. I have the first-hand experience of their brainwashing methods and Gulenist indoctrination.
        woodpanel 7y ago
        To me it always seemed like Gulen is the most internationally interviewed Turk for criticisms on Erdogan, whilst his own ideology doesn't seem so "modern" as well. Would really appreciate If you could explain what Gulenism is about and particular where it differs from the Erdoganian Muslim Brotherhood ideology.
    - Kaiyou 7y ago
      Didn't the same thing happen in South Korea with the Prime Minister being a puppet of some cult or such? What he says doesn't sound far-fetched, just unsubstantiated at this point.
- magduf 7y ago
  >But in theory courts and military can stop him. The voters can also stop him. Instead, Turkish voters not only re-elected him multiple times, they even voted in one special election to give him even more power. The Turkish people are getting the government they've voted for. >Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while. Yes, but what can you do when a nation of people democratically decide to give someone absolute power? If you try to prevent this, then you're working against democracy.
  - furbyhater 7y ago
    It's not that simple. Erdogan massively repressed his rivals, such as the parties representing the Kurdish part of the population and their sympathizers (HDP) and the whole Gülen movement, not to mention the young movement protesting in the Gezi Park a few years ago. So we cannot pretend that the elections held were fair and open, e.g. the results aren't representative of the entire population of Turkey.
    - magduf 7y ago
      Results of any election are never representative of the entire population. That's the nature of democracy. If you have 99.999% of the population voting for the same person (like in Saddam's Iraq), then it's obvious the election was a sham. Democracy is all about the majority getting to choose the leaders. As for repression, Erdogan didn't do that all by himself. Autocrats like that persist because they have a power structure under them that supports them and keeps them in power. In a democratic country like Turkey, this is supported by the people voting to keep these power structures in place. In short, the majority of the people there do support him. Yeah, it sucks that he repressed minorities, but that's one of the dangers of democracy: if the majority doesn't care about protecting minorities and their civil rights, then the minorities get stomped on. The only thing that makes a democratic system better than a completely autocratic system (like North Korea) is that at least in the democracy, there's a chance the majority will protect the minorities, and whatever institutions have been built in the system of government to do so and prevent leaders from having too much power. But as Turkey shows, and also in Germany in the 1930s, it sometimes falls apart, mainly because the people allow it to.

agumonkey 7y ago

honest question: is it a first / new or was it already the case before ?

rdiddly 7y ago
Already the case I'm sure... I'm displaying my ignorance a bit!
rolleiflex 7y ago
This is neither new nor first. Turkey has a court tradition that spans, at this point, more than seven hundred years (excluding Eastern Roman law with Corpus Iuris Civilis, which if included would bring it to 2500, an unbroken chain from whence it came, Rome) - to the point that it customarily allowed every sub-nation of the Ottoman Empire to have their own court and apply their own laws. For example, if you were Christian, you would get Christian judges, a Muslim would get the Muslim court and a Jewish person would likewise. It worked well for a long time, and when it didn’t, the modern, current court system was put in place. The general point here is that, no, Turkey is not, in fact, a banana republic, but ultimately a pretty normal enlightenment-ideas-based country which is dealing with a leader that tries to stretch everything it can find to give himself more unrestrained power. That should unfortunately be pretty familiar to people who live in the US at this point.
- Uehreka 7y ago
  While we’re talking history: I’ve heard that the system of laws codified under Justinian in the Byzantine empire ended up forming the basis for most Western law systems to this day. My math is probably off here, but is the current Turkish court system a continuous descendant from that system?
  - rolleiflex 7y ago
    That's why I left it separate under an asterisk. Not an expert, but I think what happened is that Emperor Justinian's code remained the base for the Christian law within the Empire until the modernisation, which was pretty much a merge of that tradition with updates pulled from French third republic with the exception of civil law, which was merged in from Switzerland instead. Up until 1851 the largest minority in the Empire were Muslims at 45% of the population, followed by Christians at 35%. You could argue that it's an unbroken lineage because 35% of the population still followed Roman law which was still valid and in full force, or you could argue that the most populous minority didn't, therefore a broken lineage. In either case, the reality is more shades of grey, of course: all jurisdictions of accepted law evolved side by side with some crosstalk over time. Ultimately though, Turkey terminated the application of muslim law, removed it entirely from its code and completely switched to a western code after World War I, roughly coincident with the collapse of the Empire and the foundation of the current, modern Republic. It's subject to both European Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights as the ultimate courts of appeal, both of which, I believe, have some presiding Turkish judges. (My knowledge in this field is very superficial — if someone knows better, please feel free to correct!)

turtlesdown11 7y ago

>Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such. Beautiful strawman here. Let's let Turkey go on denying genocide, murdering Kurds, destabilizing the region, and arresting political opponents and holding them without charges, because gosh darn it, they let wikipedia in.

decafbad 7y ago
Most western people are really that ignorant to think our security forces choose who to kill by ethnicity, right? I'm starting to believe this.

afterburner 7y ago

> Lot of yelling here today about the block - guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court. Sure, after 2.5 years. And after being blocked in the first place.

ska 7y ago
These sorts of court cases are rarely resolved quickly in any country that I know of. It seems easy from the outside, but it isn't.
- darkmarmot 7y ago
  The primary difference lies in execution. Most countries would err on the side of permitting the site to continue to operate, as with an injunction in the U.S. Here, it was effectively treated "guilty until proven innocent".
- kortilla 7y ago
  Do you have examples of country-wide blocks that were eventually lifted by the courts aside from this one?
- afterburner 7y ago
  In a freer country massive and immediate public uproar would have roasted hundreds of political careers and caused fast action at the top. In an even freer country, it would not have happened in the first place. What am I supposed to be impressed by?

sdinsn 7y ago

> guys it was lifted After 2.5 years... Let's not pretend like this is some major success. It's a failure by all accounts that luckily ended up OK.

vunie 7y ago
Compared to illegal mass surveillance programs that remain running to this day, and a witty intelligence head who remains free after lying under oath, this is a shinning success that should be celebrated. Hopefully other nations follow their lead one day.
- Twixes 7y ago
  Turkish authorities don't have global tech giants to tap into, but worry not, they're monitoring the internet very closely. In fact, they arrest people over tweets criticizing their rule. [0] And of course they block Wikipedia country–wide, over what Donald Trump would call "fake news" (as he does with news outlets revealing embarrassing facts about him or his administration). Not an example to be followed by any government on Earth. [0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/03/27/turkey-crackdown-social-media-posts https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/03/27/turkey-crackdown-social-...
  - remcob 7y ago
    I think grandparent was not about having surveillance programs or not, but about whether the government is being held accountable to it's own laws. A quality that is worryingly slipping in several nations. Hence the emphasis on 'illegal' and the shoddy investigation with little follow-up.
  - RaceWon 7y ago
    > Donald Trump would call "fake news" (as he does with news outlets revealing embarrassing facts about him or his administration). CNN is fake news. Period... there no debate about this fact. Their agenda, their reporting and most importantly their bent--is totally one sided. Unless of course President Trump is Actually A Plant that Putin Knew Would win the election despite Never winning Any other office--a feat which had never been done before. Tulsi is also a "Russian Asset", just ask Hillary... And here I was thinking she was a Patriot who served in a War Zone. Free your mind. The Matrix Has You... :)

LudwigNagasena 7y ago

That's because Turkey, like Russia, is a hybrid regime, it is not a pure autocracy.

yostrovs 7y ago

Some things, such as freedom of speech, I believe are universal and a government should need a very good reason to restrict some aspects of it. Therefore, access to Wikipedia should have been allowed to continue while the case was being run through the courts, as a point to be on the side of assuming the best for freedom.

sedatk 7y ago

More than 300,000 websites are still blocked in Turkey, just to put this in context. Also it's quite naive to assume that lifting the ban wasn't the government's intention, just days before European Court of Human Right's deadline to oversee the case.

dmos62 7y ago
This gives an idea of what kind of sites were blocked at the end of 2019: https://explorer.ooni.org/search?test_name=web_connectivity&probe_cc=TR&since=2019-11-01&until=2020-01-01&only=anomalies https://explorer.ooni.org/search?test_name=web_connectivity&...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

billfruit 7y ago

But court could have stayed the block till it finished arguing the case, but it didn't. It let the block be for 2.5 years, while it made up its mind. To my eye it is problematic that.

sedatk 7y ago
Because they finally reached the deadline before ECHR takes over and they don't want EU to be involved.

stale2002 7y ago

> guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court. It took 2 and half years for this to happen. That does not sound like a nation of laws to me. Imagine if this happened in America. Would you be making apologist arguments, in that situation?

ClumsyPilot 7y ago
US seems like have it's own style, like the pursuit of Jullian Assange and shutdown of Lavabit. You could argue that it's worse . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
- stale2002 7y ago
  I am not sure why people in this thread are so quick to try and defend people who shutdown websites, and important information. You don't have to defend them. Just say that they did a bad thing and call it a day.

hyko 7y ago

Turkey may be a high functioning autocracy, but it’s still just an autocracy. We’ll continue to call it out as such.

erfgh 7y ago

You know that he has sent hundreds of judges to prison, right? Some of them were arrested on the bench. This decision should read "Erdogan orders the Constitutional Court to restore access to Wikipedia".

woodandsteel 7y ago

Erdogan's program of turning Turkey into an authoritarian, Islamic society is proceeding in steps, and he has not yet fully taken over the courts.