Ankara Bar Association Stopping Free Counsel

The Ankara Bar Association will stop assigning free counsel to suspects and victims involved in Criminal Procedural Code (CMK) prosecutions on grounds that it can no longer afford to pay attorneys or their expenses in view of the state's failure to cover costs as required by law.

Ankara Bar Association CMK Board Chairman Sami Kahraman held a press conference in front of the City Justice Hall on July 17 announcing the decision which will affect CMK related victims and suspects who cannot afford legal representation.

He said the Bar Association could no longer deal with the debts of an increasing amount of cases and that lawyers were dissatisfied with the situation. No new lawyers will be assigned to CMK cases until "sufficient resources" are made available. By law, the Justice Ministry is required to cover costs of lawyers assigned by the Bar Association but payments have not been made for months.

The CMK, which went into force on June 1, 2005, has increased the burden on bar associations throughout the country with an escalated amount of prosecutions.

Kahraman explained that while before CMK the Ankara Bar Association was assigning 8 to 10 thousand lawyers a year, the number of CMK cases where lawyers were assigned had soared to approximately 40,000 since the Code went into force. The cost of cases addressed by the association, meanwhile, had increased from YTL 2 trillion to YTL 12 trillion.

The CMK Board chairman said that if the state continued to fail to pay the costs, the criminal justice system would be harmed, adding that the government and the ministries of Justice and Finance would be responsible for the negative consequences.

Decision comes in line with TBB action

Monday's announcement by the Ankara Bar Association follows last week's statement by Turkey's Union of Bar Associations (TBB) that it stopped all free counseling services for suspects and defendants in Turkey on grounds that services carried out by lawyers throughout the country under CMK had not been paid for in months.

The end to free counseling services came with an amendment of the TBB's own internal regulations which chairman of the union and lawyer Ozdemir Ozok regarded as unavoidable, arguing that free counseling, without any cover of cost or pay, was not possible.

Ozok, who stressed that the problem stemmed from the government's failure to allocated resources for the bar associations, said this was in violation of the Constitution and Code of Lawyers. "We made an internal adjustment based on these laws. For about five months lawyers have been chaos. It is not possible to offer a service without pay" he said.

Jurists evaluating the decision to bianet said the failure to pay lawyers for their 'free counseling' for clients put them in a difficult situation which harmed both the impartiality of defense and the rights of the defendants. (KO/EO/II/YE)