New Report from Turkey Finds Accused Lack Legal Representation

ISTANBUL—Only 10 percent of criminal defendants in Istanbul are represented by a lawyer, according to a new report.

The report, Alone in the Courtroom: Accessibility and Impact of Criminal Legal Aid before Istanbul Courts, presents astonishing results of an empirical study of legal aid in Istanbul, including:

• Although legal aid is free, less than two percent of defendants made use of it during their trials.
• Approximately 75 percent of defendants who were sentenced to prison were never represented by a lawyer.
• Only in 7.3 percent of cases were lawyers present during police interrogations of suspects.

"This report documents problems with the legal aid system in Istanbul, and by extension, throughout Turkey," said Zaza Namoradze, director of the Justice Initiative's Budapest office. "The Turkish government must reform state-funded legal services if it wants to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights and European Union accession criteria."

Although Turkey's Code of Criminal Procedure guarantees the right to free legal aid for all criminal suspects and defendants who wish to be represented by a lawyer, regardless of their financial status or the seriousness of their case, only a small number of defendants are able to actually exercise this right. Using interviews with criminal justice actors and findings of previous research, the report suggests several reasons why defendants fail to access free legal assistance, including lack of awareness about the right to representation. The results also suggest that the quality of the service provided by the criminal legal aid lawyers may be problematic; for example, in one third of all cases legal aid lawyers failed to request the release of their detained clients. Finally, the report recommends a series of measures that the Turkish government should undertake to ensure that defendants can effectively exercise their right to free legal aid.

Research for Alone in the Courtroom was carried out under a joint project of the Istanbul Bilgi University and the Open Society Justice Initiative. Researchers examined more than 600 case files opened in 2000–2001 and closed before 2005, observed 173 court hearings in Istanbul courts, and conducted interviews with over 75 criminal justice actors.