By Can Öztaş
Selahattin Demirtaş has long been more than a defendant; he is a barometer of how politics manages law, another act in a long-running political drama in Turkey. This is not a scripted series that keeps millions guessing on Thursday nights; it is a real-world production about the country’s future.
On July 8, 2025, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) delivered yet another Demirtaş judgment, finding multiple violations and reiterating a familiar rule: political speech, however abrasive, cannot be reverse-engineered into criminal conspiracy by treating tweets, rally remarks and parliamentary interventions as the core of a terrorism case. For years, prosecution theory has treated Article 314 of the Turkish Criminal Code as an all-purpose plot device; legality and foreseeability require tighter drafting than that.
A brief word on finality, because in this series, procedure often plays the cliff-hanger. Under Article 44(2) of the European Convention on Human Rights, a Chamber judgment becomes final in only three ways: (i) the parties waive referral to the Grand Chamber; (ii) three months pass without a referral request; or (iii) a Grand Chamber panel rejects referral. Turkey did seek referral; the panel has now rejected it. The July 8 judgment is therefore final. The procedural avenues have closed.
Yet the duty to release did not begin with this week’s episode. Earlier final Demirtaş rulings and repeated decisions under the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers’ supervision already required execution. Article 46 is not set dressing; it binds the state to abide by the Court’s final judgments. Continued non-execution has drawn sustained criticism and raises concerns that political considerations are being placed above legal obligation.
CHANGING RHETORIC
Domestic politics has also updated its cast notes. MHP Chair Devlet Bahçeli said Demirtaş’s release “would be beneficial for Turkey.” This is unlikely to reflect a late-breaking affection for Strasbourg. It reads as coalition arithmetic and risk management: a signal that the costs of defiance may now outweigh the optics costs of compliance. A teaser that gives the audience permission to accept a change in the script.
Meanwhile, the government has framed the matter as “purely judicial” a familiar maneuver that recasts a Convention duty as procedural choreography. The line preserves room for parallel prosecutions, trusteeship practices and fresh indictments, while separating “the plot” (politics) from “the courtroom scenes”. But the ECHR binds the state as such, not merely its judges. Execution requires more than a change of costume.
Incentives, moreover, appear to have shifted. Years of strategic non-execution have accumulated costs in reputational and economic terms that now seem to exceed the value of open defiance. That is not a moral awakening; it is institutional feedback. In any system that takes legality seriously, executing a Strasbourg judgment should be dull administrative routine, not a prime-time special.
What would credible execution look like, beyond a one-off set piece?
First, immediate release in the case that gave rise to the violations, without manufacturing “clone” files that re-package the same speech acts as fresh criminality. Second, a tempered reading of Article 314 consistent with legality and foreseeability. Third, an end to instrumental pre-trial detention when less-restrictive measures plainly exist. None of this is radical; it is the Court’s minimum for pluralist politics, and the difference between a legal remedy and a move for ratings.
CAUTIONS FOR AN UNCHANGED SCRIPT
There are a few cautions to keep in view. First, compliance can function as a technique: a high-profile execution to relieve international pressure and restore narrative control, while the underlying architecture of control remains intact. In show business terms, the audience is offered a reconciliation scene, but the main plot is carefully left in place for the next season.
A second caution concerns the “single good deed” trap. If a Demirtaş release coincides with intensified proceedings against opposition figures or fresh speech-crime indictments, the composite signal is not reconciliation but management. A series can change actors and keep the same plot. Compliance worthy of the name is indivisible in spirit; otherwise, it is choreography.
The final test is deliberately ordinary. The measure is not the applause that greets a release; it is the quiet after. It is a prosecutor declining theatrical charges; a judge applying law without glancing upward; a minister treating execution as paperwork, not politics; and an opposition politician speaking in the knowledge that speech belongs to politics, not to the penal code. Until the indictments stop doing the work of politics, we remain in perpetual political theater.
*Can Öztaş, LL.M., Ph.D, recently retired from Turkish diplomatic service and currently teaches courses on foreign policy and international law at Bilkent University.
