Mümtaz Soysal

Mümtaz Soysal (born September 15, 1929 in Zonguldak ; † November 11, 2019 ) was a Turkish legal scholar , columnist and politician . In 1994 he was Turkey's Foreign Minister for five months .

Life

Academic and journalistic career

Soysal graduated from Galatasaray High School in 1949 and studied political science and law at Ankara University . In 1956 he received a position as a lecturer at the political science faculty and in 1958 completed his doctorate in constitutional law.

After the military coup of May 1960 , he was appointed as a representative of the Republican People's Party (CHP) in the "Assembly of Representatives", which was supposed to submit the draft of a new constitution . Soysal was on the assembly's 20-member committee that drafted the constitutional text. With the referendum of July 9, 1961 , the new constitution was adopted with a majority of 61.7 of the electorate. It was in force from July 20, 1961 to November 7, 1982.

In 1969 Soysal was appointed professor and at the beginning of 1971 he was elected dean of the political science faculty. Shortly afterwards, after the military coup on March 12, 1971 , Soysal was arrested. Because of the lecture "Introduction to the Constitution", which Soysal gave since 1968, he was accused of engaging in communist propaganda. Soysal was sentenced to six years and 8 months in prison. He spent a total of 14 months in prison. During his time in the Ankara-Mamak detention center , he married the writer Sevgi Soysal, who was also in prison at the time . Their daughter Funda emerged from this marriage. Sevgi Soysal died of cancer in 1976, also as a result of her imprisonment, during which she did not receive adequate medical care. Soysal later married again; from this marriage with Sevinç three more children were born.

In addition to his scientific work, Soysal has been active as a journalist since the 1950s. He has written articles and columns for the magazines Forum , Akis , Yön and Ortam as well as for the daily newspapers Yeni İstanbul and Ulus . In 1974 he began to publish a column with the title Açı ("Angle") in the daily Milliyet , which he continued from 1991 in the Hürriyet . He has been writing his column in Cumhuriyet since 2001 .

In addition, Soysal was socially active in the 1960s and 1970s; he was involved in the establishment of political and scientific associations and between 1974 and 1978 deputy chairman of Amnesty International . In 1979 he was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Human Rights Education.

In the trial of the attack by the Armenian organization Asala on the Paris-Orly airport on July 15, 1983, Soysal acted as an expert in the Turkish secondary prosecution and represented Turkey's view that the massacre of the Armenians of 1914/15 should not be classified as genocide be.

Political career

In the parliamentary elections in 1991 he was elected a member of the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP). After the election, the SHP , led by Erdal İnönü , became the smaller partner of a coalition with the right path party of Süleyman Demirel and later of Tansu Çiller . Soysal aroused the displeasure of his coalition partner, but at times also the displeasure of his own party, because he repeatedly publicly criticized the government's policies and lodged several complaints with the constitutional court against individual legislative proposals, particularly on the subject of privatization. After Murat Karayalçın took over the chairmanship of the SHP, Soysal became the new foreign minister on July 27, 1994, but resigned from this post on November 28 of the same year.

Soon after, Soysal fell out with his party (which had now merged again to form the CHP) and switched to the Democratic Left Party (DSP) led by Bülent Ecevit , for which he was re-elected to parliament in the 1995 parliamentary elections. In 1998 he resigned in a dispute with Bülent and Rahşan Ecevit . Finally, in 2002 he founded the Bağımsız Cumhuriyet Partisi (Party of the Independent Republic, BCP), of which he became the first chairman. The BCP, known in the Turkish public as the “Professors' Party”, could never gain importance.

In addition to his political work in Turkey, Soysal acted as an advisor to Rauf Denktaş , the long-time president of the internationally unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus .

In the course of his life, Mümtaz Soysal published 16 non-fiction books on political and constitutional topics.

literature

• Biography at biyografi.info

Individual evidence

1. ^ Former Turkish FM, constitutional law professor Mümtaz Soysal dies aged 90. In: Daily Sabah. Retrieved November 12, 2019 .