Independence of judiciary and foreign invenstments
There's an excellent Russian-language political podcast called “Атлас мира” (Atlas of the World). In the last February episode “Султан нервничает” (Sultan getting nervous) , journalist Mikhail Magid gives what I believe is probably the best description of the role the internal judiciary systems play in international relations
Magid starts with the general introduction into the current state of affairs:
Right now Turkey goes through a severe economic crisis. Interestingly, most of the 18 years Erdogan has been quite positive in economic terms. Turkey managed to bring large foreign investments, establishing for example strong car manufacturing industry. At the same time huge amounts of money were invested into country's infrastructure, education and many Turks for the first time got access to modern medicine. This is what Erdogan's popularity was founded on.
So what happened?
Since 2018 this system started degrading. Mass-scale political repressions and arrests of tens of thousands of people turned courts into an instrument of repression controlled by the ruling party. This alarmed foreign investors, partially because the courts started to actually make judgements in favour of the party leadership and business close to Erdogan. This led to capital flight Turkey.
The core lesson here is that you can't make judiciary controllable just in one domain, like political. Once the law enforcement, public prosecution and courts are taken under control of politicians, demand to use it appears among all those who can. And they use it for any topics, including disputes between business partners.
This is precisely why Eastern Europe countries had to make an significant effort and laboriously work through reform of their judiciary in late 90's as a condition of their membership in European Union. Large investors don't really care about freedom of speech that much, as they care about the safety of their investments. But a side effect for us, citizens, was a massive improvement in the quality of law enforcement and decrease in corruption that we witnessed in
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Paweł Krawczyk https://krvtz.net/
Fediverse @kravietz@agora.echelon.pl