Who is Mumtaz Soysal?

Osman Mümtaz Soysal (born September 15, 1929, Zonguldak – died November 11, 2019, Istanbul) is a lawyer, academic and politician who made a name for himself as one of the signatories of the 1961 Constitution.

He was born in 1929 in Zonguldak Province. He graduated from Galatasaray High School (1949) and then Ankara University Faculty of Political Sciences (SBF) (1953). While working as an assistant at the Middle East Public Administration Institute, he passed the difference course exams and graduated from Ankara University Faculty of Law (1954). He began working as an assistant at the SBF in 1956; He completed his doctorate in political science in 1958. He taught for many years as a professor of Constitutional Law at the SBF.

He was a member of the Constitutional Committee as the representative of the Republican People's Party (CHP) in the House of Representatives (6 January 1961 – 25 October 1961). Soysal, who became an associate professor in 1963 and a professor in 1969, was elected as the dean of the same faculty in 1971. After the 12 March Memorandum, he was detained and arrested by the Ankara Martial Law Command on March 18, 1971, during his deanship. He was dismissed by taking part in the 1402's. He was accused of making communist propaganda in his textbook Introduction to the Constitution, which he had been teaching since 1968. He was sentenced to 6 years and 8 months of heavy imprisonment, 2 months and 20 days of security custody in Kuşadası and eternal deprivation of public rights. He spent a total of 14.5 months in Mamak Prison. While in Mamak Prison, he married the writer Sevgi Soysal.

In 1962, he founded the Socialist Cultural Association with his friends. He served as the Chairman of the Mediterranean Social Science Research Council in 1969-71, and the vice-president of Amnesty International between 1974-78. In 1979 he received the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) International Award for Teaching Human Rights.

On January 24, 1971, there was a bomb attack in front of his house on John F. Kennedy Street. Writer Adalet Ağaoğlu, who went to the scene after the explosion, talks about this situation as follows: 'Back to see, come and see now,' said Sevgi. I ran right away. I stayed there all day. The interior of the house was almost completely blown up. The ground has moved. The windows and doors of many apartments in the apartment were also cracked and burst.

The intervening party, representing the Turkish victims, participated as an expert witness in the trial of the members of ASALA, who were arrested for carrying out the Orly Airport attack, which killed eight people and injured about sixty people, caused by a bomb exploding in front of the Turkish Airlines office at Orly Airport near Paris on 15 July 1983. .

In the 1991 elections, he became a quota candidate from Ankara from the list of the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP) and was elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Soysal criticized government policies on issues such as Hammer Power, OHAL, democratization, Cyprus, and privatization in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, and drew the reaction of the coalition partner DYP, especially with his applications to the Constitutional Court for the authorization laws on privatization. As a result of these applications, the Constitutional Court gave a stay of execution decision for the first time in its history. Professor of the Constitution Soysal constantly reacted to the passive attitude of the SHP within the government partnership, and entered the Turkish political literature with the approach of "striking out". He served as the foreign minister for a short time during Murat Karayalçın's term. However, he resigned from the ministry after a while. In 1991, he received the "Outstanding Service" award from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the "Officier de l'ordire national de merite" award from France.

During the constitutional amendment studies in 1995, he remained on the agenda again, especially with his discussions with DYP's Coşkun Kırca. He played a leading role in taking the election law to the Constitutional Court. Afterwards, he broke away from the CHP and joined the DSP. He was elected as Zonguldak deputy from DSP in the 1995 general elections. Later, after falling into conflict with Bülent Ecevit and Rahşan Ecevit, he left DSP (1998). He founded the Independent Republican Party in 2002 and became the party leader.

He served as a consultant to the President of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) Rauf Denktaş for many years, who assumed the duty of constitutional advisor in the inter-communal talks in Cyprus. Mümtaz Soysal in magazines such as Forum, Akis, Yön, Ortam; He wrote columns in daily newspapers including Yeni İstanbul, Ulus, Barış, Cumhuriyet, Milliyet and Hürriyet. He continued his columns, which he started to publish in Milliyet newspaper with the title "Açı" in 1974, in Hürriyet between 1991-2001, and in Cumhuriyet after 2001. Mümtaz Soysal Gift was published by the Mulkiyeliler Union Foundation in 80 due to his 2009th birthday.

Soysal, who died on 11 November 2019 at his home in Beşiktaş, Istanbul, was married and had 2 children. His body was buried in Zincirlikuyu Cemetery.

His works

• European Union and Turkey (1954)
• Political Mechanism for Democratic Economic Planning (1958)
• Foreign Policy and Parliament (1964)
• Influence of the People on Government (1965)
• Dynamic Understanding of the Constitution (1969)
• The Meaning of the Constitution in 100 Questions (1969)
• Beautiful Unrest (1975)
• On the Way to Democracy (1982)
• Diary of Thoughts (1995)
• Is Ideology Dead?
• Disrupting Your Mind with Cyprus
• Kissable Ships
• The Trick of the Constitution
• The Wind of the Instinct
• Whale's Insects
• Meaning of the Constitution