Is Turkey democratizing with EU reforms?: an assessment of human rights, corruption and socio-economic conditions

Abstract

This study draws attention to corruption, human rights violations and economic instability as impeding factors of democratization in Turkey until the late 1990s. It is investigated if these conditions have been changing with reforms during Turkey’s candidacy to the European Union since 1999. The analysis indicates that the level of politicians’ accountability is still low and corruption still continues to be a significant problem. Regarding human rights, whereas physical integrity rights such as protection from torture and political imprisonment have been slightly progressing, political, civil and social rights, such as freedom of expression and association, seem unchanged from the pre-candidacy period. However, economic reforms appear to be effective as income levels have been improving.

Keywords:

• democratization
• human rights
• Turkey
• EU reforms
• corruption
• economic conditions

Notes

1. However, I do not claim that these are the only conditions for democratic consolidation. The focus here is problems about these factors in Turkey because they have been impeding democratization.

2. For example, the European Commission’s 2010 report on Turkey expresses concern about the existence of high number of cases on freedom of expression and press brought to the European Court of Justice. Also, in the 2010 Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, Turkey was ranked in the 138th position out of 175 countries. See, http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2010,1034.html/.

3. See also Figure 5.

4. IMF 2010 World Economic Outlook.

5. http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Data.aspx/.

6. For example, Articles 312, 159 and 169 in the 1982 Constitution define these as crime and threat to the ‘indivisible unity’ of the Turkish nation, thus, limit freedom of expression and association for radical ideologies, ethnicity and religion.

7. See Amnesty International Reports on Turkey.

8. The Articles 119 and 122 in the 1982 Constitution defines situations for martial law, state of emergency, mobilization and war.

9. For more information on this dataset, see http://ciri.binghamton.edu/.

10. Parenthesis is added by the author.

11. For the violations of human rights in these areas, see also Amnesty International’s 2009 Report on Turkey http://report2009.amnesty.org/en/regions/europe-central-asia/turkey/.