The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled on Tuesday that Turkey had violated a former state employee’s right to a fair trial after domestic courts failed to properly scrutinize his dismissal from a strategic public institution during the state of emergency declared after a failed coup in 2016, Turkish Minute reported.
In its Kandemir v. Türkiye judgment, the court found that Turkish courts had failed to carry out an effective judicial review when upholding the dismissal of Mehmet Kandemir from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), where he worked at a research center focused on information security and advanced technologies, amid investigations targeting others over alleged links to the Gülen movement.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Kandemir was dismissed in August 2016 on the grounds of “loss of trust” and security concerns, despite no concrete allegation or criminal charge being brought against him.
Turkish authorities claimed that TÜBİTAK was a strategic institution and that the managers who recruited him were later convicted in terrorism-related cases, creating an objective basis for suspicion.
The Strasbourg court rejected that reasoning, ruling that domestic courts relied on abstract and external factors rather than examining whether there were any concrete actions attributable to Kandemir himself.
It said the courts failed to explain how criminal proceedings against third parties or general security considerations could, on their own, justify suspicion directed personally at the applicant.
The judges also criticized the authorities for not informing Kandemir of the basis of the suspicions against him and for denying him a meaningful opportunity to challenge them. Even in cases where employers enjoy wide discretion, the court said, judicial bodies must act as a safeguard against arbitrariness.
While acknowledging that employees working in sensitive institutions may owe a heightened duty of loyalty to the state, the ECtHR stressed that such loyalty cannot be assessed on the basis of purely hypothetical or subjective suspicions.
It said dismissals must be grounded in verifiable elements and that courts are required to explain, in an individualized manner, how the relationship of trust was irreparably broken.
The ruling was adopted by five votes to two. Turkey’s judge Saadet Yüksel and Hungarian judge Péter Paczolay dissented, arguing that strategic institutions may apply lower thresholds of trust and that domestic courts had provided sufficient reasoning.
The court rejected Kandemir’s claims for pecuniary and non-pecuniary damages, saying that the finding of a violation of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, in itself constituted sufficient just satisfaction.
Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency (OHAL) that remained in effect until July 19, 2018. During this period, the government carried out a purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight by issuing a number of government decrees, known as KHKs.
Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
Former public servants were not only fired from their jobs but also banned from working again in the public sector and getting a passport to seek employment abroad. The government also made it difficult for them to work formally in the private sector. Notes were put on the social security database about dismissed public servants to deter potential employers.
As a result, many purge victims have had to work in uninsured jobs with very little workplace safety. There have also been several cases where former public servants have died due to occupational accidents in physically demanding jobs.
In recent years, some of the people fired have been reinstated, yet this process has often come too late. Numerous cases have surfaced where dismissed individuals, facing severe emotional and financial strain, have died by suicide or otherwise passed away before their reinstatement.
