The Powers of the Prosecutor in the Turkish Criminal Justice System from A Socio–Legal Approach

This study digests the position of the public prosecution service in the normative framework of the Turkish legal system by mentioning important paradoxical situations within the implementation of prosecutorial powers. On the one hand, due to the new criminal procedure law the prosecutor has obtained more power in the normative context. However, on the other hand, the situation in practice has not yet reached a desired level in which the practical problems must be confidently sorted out; and this gap between promises and achievements, creates challenges for the legitimacy. Therefore, the present study is concerned with investigation of the rise of the public prosecutor in the Turkish Criminal Justice System by laying out the internal and external dimensions of the prosecution service in Türkiye. The exploration also comprises some participant observations and interviewing in Türkiye.

Considering new reforms in the area of the criminal justice system emerging from the new Turkish Code of Criminal Procedure which came into force in 2005, the very idea of writing about the subject from prosecutorial powers in the Turkish Criminal Justice System in approaching to national and crossnational contexts has encouraged me to explore the new status of the prosecutor regarding the relationships between him/her and other legal officials; not merely in legal promises, but also in the real world.