Mehmet Tursun's son death was blamed on a crash until a police bullet was found in his brain, writes Nicholas Birchin Istanbul
WITH THE police trying to cover up the fact they had shot his son for failing to stop his car for an ID check, Mehmet Tursun could probably have been forgiven an emotional outburst.
Not in Turkey, where his comments have landed him in the dock, facing two years in jail on two separate charges of insulting the judiciary and security forces.
Due to begin this Tuesday, the trial against Mr Tursun stems from comments he made mid-May at the trial of 10 policemen charged with falsifying evidence after his son's death.
Baran Tursun (19) died in hospital after he lost control of his car in the western Turkish city of Izmir last November. A police report blamed his death on the crash. A surgeon found a police bullet in his brain.
Angered by the way the judge appeared to be helping the police officers give evidence in court, Mehmet Tursun said: "You are a judge, stop correcting the contradictions in the policemen's statements. What kind of a judge are you?"
He was promptly indicted under a notorious insult law used against dozens of intellectuals, including the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk.
After years of pressure from the European Union, which it is trying to join, the Turkish government finally revised article 301 of the criminal code this April. Judges now need permission from the justice ministry to continue with prosecutions.
A second article 301 case Mr Tursun faces for telling journalists he has "no faith in Turkish justice" is on hold, pending a green light from the ministry.
The changes to 301 have led to an 80 per cent reduction in the number of such cases in court and, as intended, an end to the high-profile prosecutions that so damaged Turkey's international reputation.
But less prominent Turks are still threatened by a law otherwise left unchanged, barring the replacement of a phrase about "insulting Turkishness" with the equally vague "insulting the Turkish nation".
"The aim [of 301 prosecutions] is to intimidate, to try and silence those seen as attacking the state," says Mithat Sancar, a law professor at Ankara University.
"In Turkey, the judiciary, police and the armed forces are seen as the three legs of a body whose role is to defend the state."
Laws like article 301 only strengthen that mentality.
A wealthy contractor who builds facilities for the military, Mehmet Tursun says he would be "honoured" to go to prison for his son, adding that the publicity a 301 trial would bring would make it less easy for the trial of the policemen to be quietly dropped.
"If the ministry gives the go-ahead, it will only mean the state getting its hands dirtier," he says. "That is when the media will drop the real bombs."
Yet he has good reason to be guarded in his optimism. Extensive media coverage of the 2006 trial of four policemen who shot a 12-year-old Kurdish boy in 2004 was not enough to protect the victim's family from similar charges.
Police claimed Ugur Kaymaz and his father were members of the armed separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, and that there had been a shoot-out. The coroner found nine bullets in the boy's back, most fired from less than 50cm.
"Legitimate self-defence," the judge said, acquitting four policemen of murder charges.
"Yes, terrorists were involved, but the terrorists were those who shot my brother and my nephew," Resat Kaymaz said after the verdict.
While Ugur Kaymaz's mother was acquitted of charges of "membership of a terror organisation", he was convicted last year under article 301 of "insulting state security forces" and fined 3,000 lira (€1,600), a sum he says he cannot afford. Turkey's High Court has yet to rule on his appeal.