A Turkish court can no longer put a torture verdict in a drawer.
The latest. The law known as the 12th Judicial Package was published in the Resmî Gazete and came into force this week. Its most consequential provision removes torture and ill-treatment from the reach of a mechanism that lets a court withhold announcement of a verdict, and it extends that removal to offenses public officials commit by reason of duty that amount to ill-treatment under Article 17 of the Constitution. TurkishPress has not read the official text directly. This account rests on Anadolu Ajansı's summary of the enacted law.
What the deferral did
Deferral of the announcement of the verdict, known in Türkiye by its initials HAGB, is the device at the center of this. It lets a court withhold the judgment it has reached. Our reporting when the bill was before parliament described it as a mechanism that can suspend a sentence.
Applied to a torture case, that means a court can reach a finding and never announce it.
Article 17 of the Constitution is titled personal inviolability, corporeal and spiritual existence. The new law reaches offenses that fall under it when committed by a public official by reason of duty. That is the class of case the provision is built for.
The rest of it
The bill ran to about 30 articles when it reached the floor in July, and touches several codes at once.
It extends by four years a deadline that expired on 23 July for cutting the number of chambers at the Council of State, the Danıştay, to 10. It widens the set of administrative cases a single judge can decide. It caps the gap between hearings in civil cases at three months.
It lets the Court of Cassation's chief prosecutor object to criminal-chamber rulings before the Criminal General Assembly within three months of receiving the file, with two exceptions: decisions determining venue, and decisions declining jurisdiction.
In the fraud cases Turkish coverage calls the IBAN victim problem, the sentence is halved for someone whose part was limited to handing over a payment instrument, or the information needed to use an account. The enacted text names banks, brokerages, payment service providers and crypto-asset service providers.
Two provisions had not surfaced while the bill was in committee.
Judges and prosecutors who refer a matter to an expert witness when it could be resolved with the legal knowledge their own profession requires will draw a warning penalty. And where interest is payable under the Code of Obligations or the Commercial Code and the contract does not fix the amount, it is now paid annually at 80 percent of the central bank's rediscount rate for short-term credit, as that rate stood on 31 December of the previous year.
Who is claiming it, and who is not
Justice Minister Akın Gürlek announced the entry into force on social media, describing regulations that speed up the judiciary, make justice easier for citizens to reach and strengthen the legal system. Under Erdoğan's leadership, he said, the aim is to make the Türkiye Century the century of justice.
He thanked the AK Party group and the MHP deputies of the People's Alliance. He named no opposition party.
İdris Şahin, the DEVA Party's Ankara deputy, answered with the count.
"The people wanted justice, you delivered a package," he said in a written statement. "You brought out twelve judicial packages, but as the number on the packages grew, the turn of those waiting for justice never came."
His specific charges are that inequalities in how sentences are executed remain unfixed, that grievances arising from the decree-laws have been ignored, and that long pre-trial detention has stopped being a precaution and become a punishment. Those are his positions, and the ministry has not answered them.