What made the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission behave like this?

Turkish politics, which seems to be stuck between corruption and coup, is becoming polarized once again as the 2015 general election approaches. On the one hand, there is the opposition bloc that advocates sending four former ministers of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) to the Supreme Court. On the other, there is the government which worries that this decision would make coups operational once again. The opposition's political discourse suggests that the AK Party advocates corruption, and it loses its moral ground. However, this is unlikely to have an impact on AK Party voters. This is not because the AK Party's grassroots base is "insensitive" to corruption, quite the contrary; it is an extremely sensitive segment. The funny part is that the AK Party's parliamentary group and management are also sensitive. It is a question of how the political sphere will be affected - a question which takes the matter away from corruption, and brings it directly into the juridical sphere.

It is obvious that the primary reason why the Dec. 17 case files were not referred to the Supreme Court, is the presence of AK Party members in the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission. Let us keep in mind that the Commission operates as a prosecuting institution. The opposition members examined the issue from a purely political perspective. Thus, the Commission's members from the AK Party faced a situation that was difficult to handle. They were responsible for legal analysis and two prosecutors, who had dealt with the files by then, rendered two opposite verdicts. If the files had been sent to the Supreme Court, this would have meant that the criminal element should be legally examined, and that the prosecutor, who rendered the verdict to dismiss the files, would have been deemed a culprit. It could be suggested that the Commission should not care about what would happen to the prosecutor, and should treat both prosecutors equally. However, evidence proved that the first prosecutor was guilty of misconduct. In short, regardless of whether there was corruption or not, the files were not prepared "cleanly" in legal terms. To what extent can it be legitimate to send people to the Supreme Court relying solely on the content of files which were unlawfully prepared?

The Commission's members from the AK Party answered this question, saying it was in fact illegitimate. Indeed, the files were opened based on an anonymous notification letter in 2008, but they did not undergo further legal transactions for four years. Subsequently, in 2012 and 2013, another anonymous notification letter was received, whereupon an investigation, in which hundreds of people were illegally wiretapped, was launched. The IP address of the last letter was previously used in at least 12 unsigned notifications. Such an incident in Turkey has almost always had a single meaning: these notifications are made to instigate an investigation by the police themselves. Therefore, almost all such investigations are political, and they are politically decided outside the police realm.

The Parliamentary Inquiry Commission found such files had been brought before it, and decided that the right thing to do legally, was not to recommend the alternative of the Supreme Court. Furthermore, it was clear that the Supreme Court itself could also be quite political, because what is called the "Supreme Court," is none other than the Constitutional Court, which has recently been heading toward becoming a kind of opposition. The politicized rhetoric of the president of the Court plays an important role in this. But there is another interesting factor: there is a strong conviction that three-quarters out of around 60 rapporteurs of the Constitutional Court, and all four chief rapporteurs are Gülen Movement affiliates. As it was seen in the Constitutional Court's verdict to lift the block on Twitter last April, it is an oft-told "secret" that many verdicts of the Court are directly written by the rapporteur, and are circulated among the members to be signed.

In brief, the files that were illegally transacted lay in front of the Commission, which in the face of it, was the Supreme Court, and it was uncertain to what extent the Court would comply with the law. They probably would have liked to crack down on corruption, as the grassroots wanted. But neither legal nor political common sense indicated this.