Good afternoon and thank you all for staying. Thank you for the conference organisers,
for this opportunity for all of us to explore the issues that we spend our lives
researching but don't usually have the opportunity to talk about together this paper.
Oh, okay. Thank you. This paper is the final chapter of my dissertation.
The rest of my dissertation looks at the patriarchal nature of secularism and its effects on women's political participation through the headscarf.
Specifically, Islamic or Islamists.
Women, depending on how you define Islamic or Islamic women in Turkey.
This paper is entitled The Impact of European Court of Human Rights Decisions pertaining to the headscarf on Islamist women in Turkey,
enabling an emancipation or legitimising discrimination.
However, today I'm only going to talk about one of the cases. This paper first talks about the decision.
Layla in Layla Shaheen v Turkey. Then it talks about the reaction to the decision within the Turkish state and on Turkish relations.
So in 2005, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights issued its decision in Layla Shaheen v Turkey,
a case that focussed on university university age Turkish woman who wore the headscarf
while attending university classes in her final semester of medical school.
Layla Shaheen faced a ban that the university had just implemented banning headscarf women from attending classes, tutorials and exams.
The state had for a long time associated the headscarf with Islamist politics and
being a secular state had banned the headscarf in order to protect secularism,
or so the state said. This represented more of a struggle between the long ruling secular elite and the powerful growing religious parties.
The secular elite were intent on keeping university spaces what I have deemed elsewhere as sacred secular spaces.
Places where religion could not enter. For fear that if it did, the state's secular nature would crumble.
Thus, by putting this ban in place, the state kept many religious women or many women, along with religion, out of the university structure.
So consequently, Leila Shaheen was one of nearly 26 million women in Turkey banned from universities,
some hospitals, courtrooms, parliament and working in national government offices.
Shaheen appealed first to the university and to courts within Turkey.
However, each ruled against her.
Finally, her case was heard by the European Court of Human Rights, first by chamber and then by the Grand Chamber who issued its decision in 25.
Shaheen's appeal to the European Court of Human Rights was based on was partially
based on Article nine of the European Convention on Human Rights and Freedoms,
which states that, quote, Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
This right includes the freedom to change his or her religion or belief and freedom,
either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such
limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society,
in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Shaheen Clique claimed that by disallowing her to enter the university based on the fact that she wore a headscarf for religious reasons,
the state was interfering with her right to observe her religion.
And in its decision, the European Court of Human Rights agreed that Shaheen was the state,
was in fact interfering with Shaheen's right to observe her religion by denying her the opportunity to go to school with her head covered.
However, the court found that the Turkish Turkish state was justified in disallowing Shaheen to attend university because of this expulsion,
and not allowing other women to attend was prescribed by law and necessary to keep democracy in the interest of public safety.
For the protection of public order. For health. For morals.
And for the protection of rights. And others. In fact, in the Grand Chambers decision, the European Court of Human Rights States secularism,
although completely undefined by the Turkish Constitution or Turkish legal codes,
is a founding principle of the Turkish Republic, and that ultimately secularism is the guarantee of democratic rights in Turkey.
The headscarf. The European Court of Human Rights agrees, is antithetical to secularism.
Thus, Layla Shaheen's rights were not violated.
The court justifies its assessment further by stating that in paragraph one or nine,
the court does not lose sight of the fact that there are extremist political movements in Turkey which seek to
impose on society as a whole the religious symbols and conception of a society founded on religious precepts.
The regulations concerned have to be viewed in that context and constitute a measure intended to
achieve the legitimate aims referred to above and thereby to preserve pluralism in the university.
It should be mentioned that neither the state nor Shaheen associated the headscarf with Islamist movements in their their pleas to the court.
The court took this on and brought this as part of the facts that they researched in their own writing of their opinions.
Furthermore, in paragraph one of ten or 110,
the Court states that having regard to the above background is the principle of secularism as elucidated by the Constitutional Court,
which is the paramount consideration underlying the ban on wearing on the wearing of religious insignia in universities.
It is understandable in such a context where the values of pluralism respect the rights of others,
and in particular equality before the law of men and women are being taught and applied in practice that the relevant
authorities would consider that it ran counter to the furtherance of such values to accept the wearing of religious insignia,
including, as in the present case, that women's jeans cover their heads with a headscarf well on university premises.
Thus, the Court is stating that wearing the headscarf is counter to the values of pluralism, democracy and others rights.
Previous scholarship has discussed the legal merits of the shaking decision, noting and respecting, in particular, its approach to the,
quote unquote margin of appreciation that the court allows for bearing in law between states and its discussion of gender.
But I want to briefly make another point concerning the court's decision in striking Layla Shaheen as an individual, actually, not even as a woman.
She does not discuss gender. And her complaint goes to the court asking for protection of her right to the freedom of religion.
The court, in its rulings, deny her this protection through both the facts the Court asserts and the legal merits of its judgement.
The Court treats Shaheen as a member of an Islamist conspiracy group hoping to overthrow Turkish secularism and democracy.
Consequently, the court restricts Shaheen's rights on these grounds.
However, in its decision, the court approaches the Turkish state as a singular, indivisible, homogenous entity,
recognising that it embodies the, quote unquote, revolutionary principles of secularism and democracy.
It may not be said that the Turkish state is not a homogenous individual or indivisible government or state.
Furthermore, the court says that in order to protect the state's ability to control these Islamist women and minorities,
we are only talking about women, not men. The court is not ruling on any sort of religious periods,
nor are there laws in Turkey to prevent men who wear beards from entering the same places that women can't enter if they were headscarves.
We're talking about individual women's rights, including the right to attend university,
the right to freedom of speech, the right to religious observance, and the right to oppose the state.
The court justifies its actions partially by stating that a ban on the headscarf is necessary in order to preserve women's equality,
thus overlooking the fact that many of the women that I interviewed for my research point out that if you wear the headscarf,
you are frequently going to university to overcome some of your economic.
Position, which for a lot of women is not as high as they would like.
They want to go to university to get an education, to work their way up the socio economic ladder,
to have their own money, to empower themselves educationally and socio economically.
And through this decision on the state, Turkish state's stance that they cannot do so was demised.
The decision has had an enormous impact on the overall political situation in Turkey,
not just on individual political women and on Turkish political parties.
Turkish EU accession politics are complex and I will not fully explain them here, but a quick overview can be summed as follows In 1949,
when Turkey became a member of the Council of Europe and in 1963 when Turkey became an associate member of the EU,
the elected ruling party in Turkey was the joke a party supported by the urban educated secular league.
Ataturk's party who founded Turkey. When Turkey was founded, it looked towards Europe as a model for modernity,
and EU accession to many had made obtaining this modernity, or at least EU acceptance.
In 1987, when Turkey made its formal membership application to the EU, Turgut was a member of the Netherlands Party, was the Prime Minister.
The Motherland Party was different from the joke as the Motherland Party supporters were less urban,
less educated and more religious in the day of its supporters.
However, the Motherland Party Party's policies of economic integration with Europe made many of the business minded supporters very pleased.
And it was the Prime Minister who worked at the World Bank,
and both LaSalle and his party pushed for EU accession because the economic opportunities it
would bring as it basically became clear that EU accession would require democratising reforms,
resulting in a shift in power balance in Turkey, who was pro and against EU accession changed.
The GOP became less supportive of the EU because it meant the power structure that they had benefited from for so long would change.
And simultaneously a series of Islamic and Islamist political parties began to come to power in Turkey.
The Reform Party, the Welfare Party and the AKP, the AKP in particular, had many of the same supporters as the Motherland Party,
and thus the AKP began pushing for EU accession because it thought that it would be
better off for better economic opportunities for its supporters and would force the GOP,
whose power had stemmed from close military ties to relinquish its relationship to the military,
which would allow democratisation reforms and ultimately benefit the AKP.
For several years, especially between 2002, when the AKP was first elected to 2004, when the EU agreed to start negotiations with Turkey.
The Turkish EU accession process seem daunting but perhaps manageable.
However, according to many AKP politicians that I interviewed,
a large part of Turkey's desire to join the EU was the Islamic AKP's belief that the European
Union would help it overcome the democratic roadblocks of the GOP have kept in force for so long,
including the headscarf ban, which might then plagued Turkey for 15 years.
When the Shaheen's decision was announced, AKP officials noted their disappointment.
The European Court of Human Rights and even with the European Union, although the courts and the Union are not technically related.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan stated that he was, quote unquote,
shocked that the court had ruled against Shaheen and would not allow headscarf women within the universities.
He furthermore was caught off guard that the AKP had not,
or that the court had not protected the rights of women to get an education and individual rights generally.
So the party as a whole was truly surprised that the court had not ruled in favour of headscarf for women in Turkey.
And this, I found out through research interviews, began a downturn in Turkish EU relations.
The Shaheen decision is not the sole source of a lot of the slowdown in Turkey's EU accession.
But the AKP felt that after this decision decision was announced that the EU was more of a Christian club
than they ever had before and that Turkey would not be welcoming it under any circumstances at any time.
Consequently, the AKP focussed Turkey's foreign relations elsewhere, most notably on developing relations with Syria and Iran.
And in some interviews I conducted,
the interviewees noted that Shaheen started a mindset within the arc of the court will never further write in Turkey.
Why should we concentrate our political power on this? It's not a priority, and we've been rejected essentially by Europe within Turkey.
The Shaheen decision also had two other notable effects.
First, it changed the rhetoric that headscarf wearing women used to advocate for their rights before Shaheen
headscarf when women advocated for their rights by stating it was part of their freedom of religion.
Post Shaheen headscarf wearing women starting using the framework of human rights by which to advocate for their position.
This change in discourse, ironically, led to headscarf women, forming coalitions with other human rights groups such as gays,
lesbians and Kurds that their previous rhetoric had not connected themselves, not connected them with.
Second, the part of secular Turkey that within secular Turkey, or at least secular, it's part of Turkey.
The Shaheen decision legitimised the idea that the headscarf wearing women were
indeed a sign of creeping Islamist threat that would result in Iran like theocracy.
In 2008, when the AKP attempted to change the constitution to remove the ban on headscarves,
an estimated 7 million bareheaded women marched in the streets,
decrying that if headscarves were allowed in universities, Turkey would become the next Iran.
This justification echoed the history the European Court of Human Rights decision in Shaheen, almost word for word.
Ironically, by that time, even the headscarf wearing women, at least many of them, had disassociated themselves from the AKP.
Many felt that the AKP had, quote unquote, used the headscarf decision in order and headscarf politics to recruit women as campaign volunteers
then failed to truly attempt to ensure the headscarf wearing women gained access to university.
This included their 2008 attempt to change the Constitution.
Many headscarf women said that they knew that male AKP members who proposed this change to the Constitution knew
it would fail and were only trying to do this in order to appear that they were attempting to change things.
Thus,
I will conclude by saying that the Shaheen decision had a you had unique and unexpected effects on Turkey relations and politics within Turkey itself.
The decision was clearly written to, quote unquote, save women from, quote unquote, Islam.
The court wanted to protect women, making sure that they would not be subject to being forced to wear the headscarf,
either by their own male relatives or by headscarf when female students in schools if they were allowed.
If these women will continue to be allowed within schools.
However, the decision resulted in fracturing Turkish EU relations, resulting in the male leaders of Turkey developing deeper ties with Iran and Syria.
Second, the decision legitimated the secular elite's discrimination against Islamist women,
but not men being allowed in many public spaces spaces including universities.
Third, the decision resulted in another switch after Shaheen the Shaheen ruling, the secularist Turkish elite,
many of them decided that they did support EU accession more because the court,
it seemed to them, had backed their idea that there was this Islamist threat in Turkey and legitimated the laws that kept within out of school.
Whereas, as illustrated by some of the quotes and comments I stated earlier, the AKP felt.
That there was no real point in pursuing EU accession and turned against EU accession in many ways, although not formally.
Finally, the decision resulted in women who supposedly needed to be saved from the veil, fighting even more adamantly for their veils.
Yet doing so using the very language of human rights that was used by the European Court of Human Rights to deny them their rights.
And these women turning against the Islamist political parties whom they viewed as males who had failed to secure women's rights to veil.
Ironically, this assisted them in developing what is truly an individual based notion of rights in Turkey.
Thank you. I look forward to.