The power of ordinary laws and the feebleness of constitutional rights: the right to freedom of assembly in Turkey

This article focuses on the gap between the domestic law and practices concerning the right to assembly in contemporary Turkey and the right to assembly as a basic human right entrenched in the Turkish Constitution and in the international human rights law obligations of Turkey. The article offers an assessment of the trajectory of the right to assembly in Turkey, as reflected in the legalisation of the right to assembly in ordinary laws, in the Turkish Constitution and human rights law, and more recently, in court rooms, in the light of the growing litigation before the European Court of Human Rights and, recently, before the Turkish Constitutional Court. The article argues that obstacles to entrenching freedom of assembly in Turkey are a function of the decoupling of the logic of ordinary laws and rights-based constitutionalism in the Turkish political and legal culture, where the former is perceived as more authoritative in practice than the latter. The future of the respect for freedom of assembly in Turkey depends on countering this reverse logic through shifts in judicial and political culture.