Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya

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Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya (born March 10, 1950 in Şanlıurfa ) is a Turkish lawyer . He was Attorney General at the Court of Cassation from 2007 to 2011 .

Family and career

Yalçınkaya comes from a Kurdish family and grew up in southeast Anatolia not far from the Syrian border. His maternal grandfather was a well-known local sheikh and a respected leader of the Islamic Naqshbandi order. From him he got his first name Abdurrahman. His father, Behzat Yalçınkaya, a trained teacher , broke with the faith and advocated secular ideals. Nevertheless, he contributed to the construction costs of the mosque of Kara near Şanlıurfa, the hometown of the Yalçınkayas. He raised his son in the spirit of Kemal Ataturk .

Yalçınkaya moved to the capital Ankara while still at school . There he graduated from high school and studied at the Law Faculty of Ankara University , which was founded by Ataturk. After graduating in 1973, he made a career in the state judiciary and became a judge in various cities in Turkey, where he distinguished himself as a fighter against corruption and drug smuggling. On April 14, 1998, he moved, also as a judge, to the Court of Cassation ( Yargıtay ), the highest ordinary court in the country.

Attorney General

In June 2004, he joined the Public Prosecutor's Office, which he headed from May 21, 2007 following an appeal by former President Ahmet Necdet Sezer . In November 2007, his application for a ban against the only Kurdish party in the Turkish Grand National Assembly , the DTP, caused a stir . Yalçınkaya accused the party of being the extended arm of the Kurdish underground organization PKK and of violating the constitutional principle of the indivisibility of the state. On December 11, 2009, the Turkish Constitutional Court approved Yalçınkaya's request and issued a ban on the party.

Yalçınkaya became internationally known when, on March 14, 2008, he also filed a ban against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ruling AKP party , which won almost 47 percent of the vote in the July 2007 parliamentary elections . In addition, he applied for a five-year political ban on 71 AKP politicians, including Erdoğan himself, the parliamentary speaker Köksal Toptan and the incumbent President Abdullah Gül . According to Yalçınkaya, the AKP was Islamizing the Turkish state; he accused the party of being a "focus of activities against the principle of secularism ".

In the 162-page indictment, he criticized, among other things, the relaxation of the ban on headscarves at Turkish universities initiated by the AKP , which undermines the constitutional separation of mosque and state. It was irrelevant to him that Erdoğan's party had received the government mandate from the majority of the Turkish people. He was quoted as saying: “Hitler also came to power democratically.” Even before he was charged, he had classified the AKP as “fundamentalist and dangerous” and perceived the beginning of “Iranian conditions”. In July 2008, the eleven judges voted six to five for a party ban - but a quorum of seven yes-votes would have been required. Yalçınkaya's application for a ban was therefore rejected, but government funding for the ruling AKP party was canceled.

In May 2011, Yalçınkaya's tenure as Attorney General at the Court of Cassation ended; he was replaced in this capacity by Hasan Erbil .

Reactions

Yalçınkaya's work is judged very controversially in Turkey. While Kemalist newspapers such as Cumhuriyet see him as the last upright against the threatening Islamization of the Turkish state, Islamic-conservative media such as the daily newspaper Zaman, which belongs to the Fethullah Gülen movement , criticize him as a “chief Jacobin” and “grand inquisitor”. Politicians in the European Union also distanced themselves from the proposed AKP ban . The former EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn warned with a view to the Prosecutor General's motion for a ban: "In a normal European democracy, political issues are discussed in parliament and decided by elections, but not in courtrooms".

A jury compiled by the newspaper Tempo from the media group Doğan ranked Yalçınkaya among the fifty most influential people in Turkey in July 2008.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b "I'm not backing down" Tagesspiegel, March 19, 2008
  2. ↑ a b The Turkish chief prosecutor, the daily newspaper, March 17, 2008
  3. ^ Kurdish party DTP banned ( Memento from December 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) www.tagesschau.de, December 11, 2009
  4. ↑ AKP'YE KAPATMA DAVASI İDDİANAMESİ. March 14, 2008, archived from the original on May 9, 2008 ; Retrieved January 5, 2014 (Turkish, Attorney General's indictment, cited from www.netbul.com).
  5. ↑ a b c Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya - Sword of the Bureaucracy Rheinischer Merkur, April 10, 2008
  6. ↑ Dilek Zaptcioglu: Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya - Defender of Disbelief. Head of the day. In: FTD.de. Financial Times Deutschland, March 18, 2008, archived from the original on May 19, 2008 ; Retrieved January 5, 2014 .
  7. ↑ Turkish Constitutional Court rejects ban on ruling party Der Spiegel from July 30, 2008, accessed on June 18, 2013
  8. ↑ Tempo: 'Türkiye'yi yöneten 50 kişi' in milliyet.com.tr on July 12, 2008
personal data
SURNAME Yalçınkaya, Abdurrahman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Turkish lawyer, attorney general (2007-2011)
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Şanlıurfa