Associate Professor \u00dcmit Kocasakal has been elected the new chairman of the \u0130stanbul Bar Association after securing more than 6,000 votes cast by lawyers.<\/p>\n
Nearly 20,000 lawyers cast a vote in the elections on Sunday. While Kocasakal received 6,080 votes, he was followed by Muammer Ayd\u0131n, the former head of the association, who received 4,520 votes. Sat\u0131lm\u0131\u015f \u015eahin came in third with 4,055 votes and Kemal Ayta\u00e7 fourth with 3,247 votes.<\/p>\n
Kocasakal told reporters that under his chairmanship the \u0130stanbul Bar Association will stand by law and justice without being close to any political party. \u201cI will try my best to be the chairman of all \u0130stanbul Bar Association members, irrespective of whether they did or did not vote for me,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n
He also said the bar association would continue its fight to settle profession-related problems experienced by its members. \u201cI will not let any member who voted for me down. I say this sincerely. The \u0130stanbul Bar Association will stand by the fundamental principles of the republic and its unitary identity. We will stand by our profession. The \u0130stanbul Bar Association will uphold law and justice without being close to any political party,\u201d Kocasakal added.<\/p>\n
There were earlier claims that Kocasakal has links to the People\u2019s Liberation Army of Turkey (THKO), an illegal and armed Marxist terrorist organization. He is also known to be a strong opponent of the ongoing case against Ergenekon, a clandestine criminal organization accused of working to overthrow the government. He has previously criticized the arrest of many individuals on charges of membership in Ergenekon.<\/p>\n
Dozens of people are currently under arrest, charged with being Ergenekon members. Among them are journalists, businessmen and active duty and retired members of the judiciary. Furthermore, Kocasakal has frequently targeted the former \u0130stanbul Bar Association chairman, Ayd\u0131n, over his relatively \u201csoft\u201d stance against the Ergenekon operation.<\/p>\n
09 November 2010, Tuesday<\/p>\n
TODAY\u2019S ZAMAN \u00a0\u0130STANBUL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Associate Professor \u00dcmit Kocasakal has been elected the new chairman of the \u0130stanbul Bar Association after securing more than 6,000 votes cast by lawyers. Nearly 20,000 lawyers cast a vote in the elections on Sunday. While Kocasakal received 6,080 votes, he was followed by Muammer Ayd\u0131n, the former head of the association, who received 4,520 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":107670,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[102,4212],"class_list":["post-25293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-istanbul","tag-kocasakal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}