BY ALI BAYRAMOGLU
YENI SAFAK- The European Court of Human Rights ruling on the Ocalan case spurred more fierce debate in Turkey. While the ruling party is trying to buy some time to determine its next move, opposition parties want the governing party to come out against the ruling at once.
However, the ECHR ruling won’t change; it’s definite. We need to accept the following three facts about the ECHR:
1. The ECHR is Turkey’s own court, not a foreign one, because we accepted its jurisdiction years ago. In addition, as a European Union candidate country, we have to respect its rulings.
2. The ECHR and the Copenhagen criteria are directly related to each other.
3. If Turkey fails to implement the ECHR rulings, it would be excluded from the Council of Europe and then its EU membership negotiations would end. This is a regular procedure which is valid for each Council of Europe member.
In other words, it’s high time for Turkey to decide whether it is capable of shouldering the EU burden. We cannot negotiate the ECHR’s jurisdiction. The only way to not implement its rulings is to completely forsake our EU aspirations. As a matter of fact, certain anti-EU circles in Turkey are working to use the Ocalan ruling as a pretext to estrange Ankara from Brussels. However, in such a case, our political and social lives would be like hell… Even our democratic regime would suffer serious harmed…
Therefore, Turkey must respect and implement the ECHR ruling for its own welfare and stability. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we must accept all of the high court’s rulings without questioning or discussing them.
I believe that the Ocalan ruling is simply a matter of implementation of a regular, technical procedure. Under these circumstances, if Turkey doesn’t want to be isolated, Ankara must implement this ruling and Turkish society must respect the ECHR’s authority. Let’s not forget that the Ocalan case and other cases that we are likely to face in the future spring from Turkey’s own old unresolved problems. No matter what we think or feel about the ECHR rulings, these are not political decisions. They are nothing but the results of an international legal system, which has its own pros and cons.