One Resignation Doesn’t Prove Justice Operates Fairly in Turkey

That is why the Imamoglu comparison belongs here. If the fund scandal tests what happens when scrutiny moves towards financial, bureaucratic and political power, his case shows how it operates towards the opposition. Campaign group Human Rights Watch says Imamoglu received roughly 80,000 pages of case material on six DVDs while being allowed computer access for only around two hours a week. Much of the case against him also relies on protected witnesses and statements from suspects seeking sentence reductions under “effective repentance” provisions. His principal lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan, was himself placed in pre-trial detention over statements from two suspects seeking benefits under those provisions. The verdict is for the court. But the conditions in which it is being produced matter. For instance, some defendants have been left contesting basic issues, such as evidence dated after employment ended or detention orders made before the judge had read the file. The imbalance is also visual. Since the first raids on Istanbul municipality in March 2025, images of dawn searches and detainees walking in single file have reached TV screens before courts established guilt. The lawyer for Deniz Goktas, a comedian detained over his critical tone about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said police made his client repeat the same handcuffed walk four or five times for the cameras. There is something almost pre-modern in this kind of stigma, of marking the suspect publicly first and adjudicating later. Even within the funds investigation, coercive measures have varied. Ismet Ogut, brother of a former opposition CHP MP, was remanded in custody after investigators identified 3.09 billion lira [about 55.9 million euros] in fund outflows in his name. Meanwhile, Mustafa Yazici, son of an AKP deputy chairman and a suspect in the same money-laundering and capital-markets probe, was questioned after prosecutors moved to restrict his assets. Not surprisingly, his restriction was lifted within hours. Yazici’s business interests also include Adil Varlik, a company that buys distressed debt. Reporting based on company figures says more than 90 per cent of the debt files it bought in 2025 came from Turkcell, which the Wealth Fund controlled in the first half of 2026. There is nothing illegal about buying distressed debt. But, from the other end, a household cannot pay a telephone or device bill, the debt is sold at a discount, and one family’s financial distress becomes another person’s financial asset. The World Inequality Report 2026 estimates that Turkey’s richest 10 per cent own 68.4 per cent of the country’s wealth, while the poorest half own only 2.7 per cent. In a country with that level of inequality, who receives scrutiny, protection and accountability is not a technical question. Kaya’s resignation may answer a question of political responsibility, and demanding a fair trial for Imamoglu does not establish his innocence. But both point to the same question: can institutions determine what happened before politics determines the answer? In a world of managed images, selective leaks and blocked reporting, the law remains one of the few methods for producing a credible public account of reality. Once that capacity is lost, injustice is only part of the damage, and society is left without a reliable account of what has happened to it. Anil Kemal Aktas is a researcher and trainee lawyer whose work focuses on the intersection of law, democracy, political economy and electoral politics in Turkey. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.