President Erdoğan replaces justice minister, statistical authority head
Bekir Bozdağ and Abdülhamit Gül at the handover ceremony. (Photo: Ministry of Justice)
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President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) Chair Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has replaced the minister of justice and the chair of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat).
Minister Abdülhamit Gül announced on Saturday (January 29) that his "request to be pardoned from his duty" was accepted by the president.
Bekir Bozdağ, and AKP deputy and the head of the Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution, replaced Gül as the justice minister. Bozdağ had served as the justice minister between for two terms between 2013 and 2017 and as the deputy prime minister between 2011 and 2013 and 2017 and 2018.
Gül's removal from office came after his public objection to the leaking of city surveillance camera footage showing İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu going to a fish restaurant amid blizzards in İstanbul, for which he was heavily criticized by the pro-government media.
Implicitly targeting Süleyman Soylu, the minister of interior, Gül said a day before his resignation that the state authorities should respect people's privacy and abide by the Law on the Protection of Personal Data.
This wasn't the first time that the two ministers publicly criticized each other.
When Soylu proposed demolishing abandoned buildings without a court order to prevent drug use in them, Gül had reminded him of "supremacy of law."
The interior minister had criticized the justice system when a person who insulted his mother on social media was not arrested. In response, Gül had said, "no one can point a finger at the judiciary."
TurkStat
President Erdoğan on Saturday also replaced the head of the TurkStat for the fourth time in 20 months.
The president dismissed Sait Erdal Dinçer and appointed Erhan Çetinkaya, the deputy chair of the Banking Regulatory and Supervision Agency (BDDK).
Main opposition Republican People'S Party (CHP) Chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu reacted to the appointment on social media, saying that Erdoğan "dumped yet another TurkStat bureaucrat."
Kılıçdaroğlu once again repeated his call to the bureaucrats "not to become accomplices of the government."
Over the past few years, the TurkStat has been widely criticized over the accuracy of its figures, especially those of unemployment and the inflation rate.
The TurkStat figures on unemployment often contradicted the figures of the Turkish Employment Agency (İŞKUR).
While the number of the unemployed increased by 178,000 between November 2020 and 2021 according to the İŞKUR, it decreased by 284,000 in the same period according to the TurkStat.
Also, during the term of Dinçer, the TurkStat did not disclose the death statistics for 2020, which critics say would reveal the real death toll of the coronavirus pandemic. (RT/TP/VK)