Two consultation meetings were organised in Ankara and Istanbul on 11 and 13 July 2017, respectively, under the Project “Strengthening Judicial Ethics in Turkey”. The meetings, which were organised by the Council of Europe and the Council of Judges and Prosecutors of Turkey (CJP) and supported by the Training Department of the Ministry of Justice, brought together judicial support staff from across the two cities and aimed to gather their input for the Ethical guidelines for the judges, prosecutors and inspectors.  These guidelines will be drafted as a supplement to the Code of Ethics for the Turkish judiciary which is planned to be adopted this autumn.

The meeting had two-fold goals – to discuss with the judicial support staff the principles that will be enshrined in the new code prepared by the members of the working group tasked to draft the text of the code and to receive feedback from the participants on this, and to collect the examples illustrating and explaining the ethical issues and challenges judges and prosecutors encounter in their daily work.

In practice, application of these principles to the daily work is not always clear as the general ethics principles and the code suggest. For this reason, the ethics guidelines that are to be developed will advise and assist the judges and prosecutors to make their own choices, on the basis of the explanations of general principles and practical examples, drawn from experience of the participants.