The dilemma of amnesty politics in the AKP era: balancing the questions of legitimacy and instrumentality

Abstract

The Ankara Bar Association Human Rights Commission (Ankara Barosu İnsan Hakları Komisyonu) underlines that 158 amnesties in total, except for the 1999 Conditional Release Law, were legislated in Turkey before the AKP period, and 12 of these laws were general amnesties. Regarding the content of these laws, the Turkish state has tended to release the prisoners who commit petty crimes having a non-political character. However, the continuity in the use of amnesty mechanism in Turkey was broken at a certain historical moment: the beginning of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) era. For the first time, the ruling party has officially declared its disapproval of general amnesty, especially for crimes against individuals. This thesis aims to examine why general amnesty, as a long-term phenomenon in Turkey, has not been applied during the AKP period. Following the introductory Chapter One, Chapter Two looks into how three premises of neoliberal penality are used in the AKP era for an effective struggle against crime: punitiveness, responsibilization and managerialism. Chapter Three examines the ways in which the AKP government copes with the problems facing the judicial system of Turkey, i.e. high incarceration rates, and the high workload of the judiciary, without the amnesty option. Chapter Four explores the controversial debate on the legitimacy of amnesty by interrogating the AKP’s alternative moral stance on amnesty, whereas Chapter Five concludes the thesis. Briefly, this thesis develops insight into the AKP’s policy on amnesty circumscribed by both the questions of legitimacy and instrumentality, as well as by the dynamics of political conjuncture.