In the opening ceremony of the new judicial year at the Presidential Complex in Ankara, President and Justice and Development Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made remarks on lawyer Ebru Timtik, who lost her life on Friday (August 28) on a death fast demanding a fair trial.

 

He said that the state "did its part to make the lawyers who went on a hunger strike in support of the terrorist organization members who martyred our Prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz," referring to the 2015 incident where two members of the outlawed Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) members took Prosecutor Kiraz hostage in his room in the İstanbul Courthouse.

 

Timtik was neither charged with aiding the two DHKP-C members nor stated that her death fast was in support of them.

 

Erdoğan went on to say that hanging Timtik's poster on the building of the İstanbul Bar meant "more than making our martyrs turn in their graves."

 

"Attorneys standing with terrorists so recklessly, attending their funeral while wearing robes, releasing declarations in support of them are not acceptable acts," he explained.

 

After Timtik's death, her poster was hung on the bar's building but the bar later stated that it wasn't hung by bar officials, who it said immediately replaced them with a flag of Turkey to "demonstrate its stance."

 

Minister of Interior Süleyman Soylu and Minister of Justice had also targeted the bar over the poster.

 

Also, it should be discussed whether attorneys who are "so intimate" with terrorist organizations should be dismissed from the profession just as in other professions, according to the President.

 

"As an attorney who defends a drug baron does not attempt to do drug trade, an attorney who defends a murderer doesn't attempt murders, it is not possible that an attorney of a terrorist can embark on being a terrorist," he remarked.

 

"A lawyer, who does a public duty, shouldn't be able to do what a judge, a prosecutor, a police officer, a soldier can't do. If s/he does it, there should definitely be a price for it.

 

"Such a crooked situation can't be allowed in any country in the world. No element of the judiciary can be subordinated to any ideology. Justice has to be the only ideology of the judiciary."

 

Saying that the recently enacted law allowing multiple bar associations in larger provinces was aimed at "saving bars from this problematic structure," Erdoğan remarked that they would to what is necessary to block "the road from attorneyship to terrorism."