Türkiye's parliament went back to work this week with two things on the calendar at once: a stack of justice legislation, and the 10th-anniversary program for the 15 July 2016 coup attempt.
The General Assembly returned Tuesday. Top of the agenda was the bill the press has been calling the "12th Judicial Package," officially the Bill on Amendments to Certain Laws for the Effective and Efficient Operation of the Judiciary. The Justice Committee cleared it in late June. It runs to about 30 articles and touches several codes at once.
The most concrete change extends, by four years, a deadline that would have expired on 23 July to cut the number of chambers at the Council of State (Danıştay) to 10. The bill also widens the set of administrative cases a single judge can decide, caps the interval between hearings in civil cases at three months, and lets the Court of Cassation's chief prosecutor object to criminal-chamber rulings before the Criminal General Assembly within three months.
Two provisions drew the most attention. Deferral of the announcement of a verdict, a mechanism that can suspend a sentence, will no longer apply to torture and ill-treatment offenses, or to abuses a public official commits by reason of duty. And in fraud cases known in Türkiye as the "IBAN victim" problem, the penalty is halved for someone whose only role was handing over the account details used to move stolen money, while the organizers face unchanged sentences.
Moving alongside it, and also tagged the "12th package" by some outlets, is a separate 18-article bill amending the Child Protection Law. It raises sentences for grave crimes committed by minors, lowers the age at which repeat-offense rules can apply from 18 to 15, bars knife sales to under-18s, and adds a digital-risk measure that lets a court monitor a child's devices for up to two years. It also replaces the legal term "child pushed into crime" with "child in the judicial process."
The anniversary program falls on Wednesday. At 12:30 a Mevlid-i Şerif is read at the TBMM Mosque for the martyrs and for veterans who have since died. Carnations are laid at the parliament's 15 Temmuz Martyrs' Monument and the memorial stone in the Hall of Honor, where three exhibitions open, including one of front pages from that night.
The ceremony itself is in the Meclis Tören Salonu, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş are expected to address the room. A day earlier, Erdoğan sent a written message to a separate AK Parti symposium on the coup attempt, pledging to keep fighting the network the state blames for it "within the law."
For the events of that night and how the decade since has been remembered, see our anniversary essay, The night that became a decade.