Democratization in Turkey under AKP Government

Abstract

The term “freedom of expression” is quite broad and holistic. It includes, within its ambit, not only the conventional freedom of speech and freedom of media, but also the freedom of thoughts, cultural expression, conscience, and intellectual inquiry. Freedom of expression ensures an individual's right to express his/her views openly within the domain of constitution, which also contains the right to be criticial of the prevailing injustices, illegal, anti-social activities, and incompetence and failure of ¬¬¬the government. All this is with a guarantee of safety and without any apprehension or fear of retaliation. Freedom of expression, in contemporary times, also embraces the right to be informed and seek information by the public, to express opinions, and advocate amendments, including changing the regime without resorting to violent means through peaceful measures available in the public domain, with reasonable restrictions. In the past decade and half, Turkish experience as a transitional democracy presents an interesting case study to explain as to how the state of freedom of expression is causally related to the failure of the EU-driven reform process undertaken by the ruling AKP (Turkish: Adaletve Kalkınma Partisi) since the year 2002, when the party won the Parliamentary elections in Turkey for the first time. The issue about the press freedom and freedom of expression in Turkey has for very long time, attracted a great amount of scholarly attention and provoked extensive debate both inside and outside Turkey. Although Turkey remains one of the rare democracy in the West Asia, a region with strong monarchic and semi-monarchic tradition of government, a series of development in the past years has raised several interrogations about the qualitative and quantitative aspects of democracy in Turkey under the AKP.