There are indeed judges in Ankara

Last night, breaking news came out from the reporters who had been waiting for hours at the gates of Turkey's Constitutional Court. The court had ruled that the rights of daily Cumhuriyet Editor-in-Chief Can Dündar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gül had been violated. In other words, these journalists, who had been in jail for 92 days, had to be released. 

Thanks to this decision, Dündar and Gül were let go early in the morning, to be welcomed, in tears, by their families, friends and colleagues. They thanked everyone who supported them, and added: "Let this be a present to President Tayyip Erdo?an." 

This "present" was sent to Ankara's strongest man, for it was him who condemned Dündar and his colleagues at Cumhuriyet for "high treason" months ago and asked for them to be arrested. Soon, a prosecutor opened a legal case against Dündar and Gül and an Istanbul court put them in jail. It was a perfect example of the dissolution of judicial independence in the "New Turkey": The ruler gave the verdict, and the judiciary followed.

The "crime" of Dündar and Gül was to publish photos of Turkish National Intelligence Agency (M?T) trucks covertly carrying weapons to Syria. This was condemned as "espionage." It was mere news making, however, in the sense that the Iran-Contra affair was freely exposed by the American media in the 1980s. 

Now, the good thing is the Constitutional Court had the wisdom, and the guts, to stand up for free press in this case, despite the heat it may get from zealous supporters of the regime. This, once again, confirmed that in the depressing scene of our illiberal democracy, there is at least one institution that we can trust.

I had shared this observation before in this column, last summer, in a piece...