Legal Responses to 'Terroristic Speech': An Evaluation of The Turkey's Law in The Light of Ecthr and Unhrc Standards

Much scholarly attention has focused on the incremental extension of criminal liability for ‘terroristic speech’ that widely reflects acknowledged preventive turn in criminal law. This book examines the case law of Turkey's Yargıtay (Court of Cassation) and Constitutional Court on 'terroristic speech' in the light of regional (the European Court of Human Rights), and international (Human Rights Committee and CERD) standards. While this corpus of human rights law has obtained positive traction in Turkey with several progressive Constitutional amendments, it is argued that the modern-day regulation of 'terroristic speech' resembles in many ways the now outmoded offence of 'sedition' for silencing unsolicited expression. It must of-course be recognized that Turkey has experienced a protracted conflict, and that recent ‘terror’ attacks in European capital cities have reinvigorated the international ‘War on Terror’. At a deeper level, however, this observation evidences a troubling state of affairs, for, even in this ‘human rights era’, the imposition of far-reaching restrictions on speech continues seemingly without contradiction. Indeed, in many cases, the relevant criminal law offences, especially those pertaining to indirect incitement, were themselves been introduced at the behest of international instruments such as the UN Security Council Resolution 1624 (2005); the Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism, 2005; and the European Union Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism, 2008. It is argued that the regulation of ‘terroristic speech’ epitomizes the state-centricity of human rights norms; (a phenomenon which Leigh and Lustgarten colourfully describe as assigning ‘the safekeeping of children in a school playground to a pit-bull terrier’). Moreover, it also reflects the fundamental inability of the international community to agree upon a definition of ‘terrorism’. The book thus draws attention on the ‘invention’ of ‘terrorism’ as a fundamentally political term involving moral judgment. It is argued that the infusion of this political concept into legal reasoning is inherently problematic. The binary nature of ‘terrorism’ belies the more spectral nature of ‘political violence’, and it is the latter which ought to inform a more nuanced judicial response to ‘terroristic speech’.