Compensation culture is commonly regarded as one of the banes of modern society, a sign of a get rich quick mind set where every misfortune is someone else’s fault and also an opportunity to make one’s own fortune. Yet in a developing country like Turkey the development of a compensation culture is a critical indicator of an increase in concern for public health and safety and the protection of consumer rights.  

The front page of one of the broadsheets carried the story this week of Muammer Devecioğlu who was awarded 7,700YTL (or £3250) plus interest for drinking rakı from a bottle that he belatedly realised had a fly in it. The judge İlhan Kara said; ‘as the bottle had a special ball bearing pouring mechanism there was no chance that the fly had entered the bottle after it was opened’. Mr Devecioğlu was awarded the compensation because the ingestion of the contaminated rakı had ‘taken away the enjoyment he had previously found in drinking rakı and made him feel disgusted when he thought about it’. His lawyers claim that his health had been threatened and the judge made the award after concluding that the experience had caused Mr Devecioğlu to become depressed. 

Many Turks reading this piece will have expressed disbelief at the award for a number of reasons. There are those like Alaattin Candan who lost his daughter in a train accident that killed forty people in 2004. He has waited years for the courts to decide who was responsible for the accident so that he could start a compensation case against the state railway organisation TCDD. The court finally ruled this month that TCDD were half responsible and that fifty percent of the responsibility lay with two mechanics, Mr Candan’s lawyers are appealing the decision and the length of time taken for the ruling (four years) which now means that the time limit for compensation claims has expired.  

İn 1995 Şengül and Hüseyin Başaran took their three year old daughter to a public hospital suffering from a heavy cold. The nurse on duty, Pakize Özkan, administered an injection so badly that the end result was the amputaion of Pakize’s arm below the elbow. İt took eight years and seventy nine court hearings for the Başaran family to get a ruling in their favour and their daughter was awarded 119,000YTL (or £50,000) compensation for her lifelong disability. İn 2005 student Mehmet Belin was playing football in his school playground when the goal post fell and struck him on the head. He lost all sight in one eye and ninety percent of the sight in his other eye. His case took two years to get through the court system and he was finally awarded 270,000YTL (or £114,000) for his injury. Both families are likely to be disgusted that Devecioğlu received a relatively large payout for drinking rakı that a fly had swum in. 

Other readers though will be surprised that Devecioğlu was able to follow through a court case against a big company, Orhan Demir, vice president of the Consumer’s Association commented; ‘The public are still not comfortable with seeking compensation and the main reasons for this are the high costs of pursuing a case and the long time it takes.’ Lawyer Gökhan Güneş of GD & Co welcomed the rakı ruling saying that though this case might seem absurd it indicated a shift in the mindset of the public, ‘Although these types of cases are still uncommon they are increasing, members of the public are increasingly more willing to sue hospitals and madical staff for malpractice or to act against a council if the public bus they are travelling on has an accident. These are welcome changes in Turkey’s judicial life.’ 

No win – no fee legal services have done a great deal to increase the number of compensation suits brought in both the UK and the USA but no similar system exists in Turkey. Under Turkey’s tax regulations lawyers are obliged to raise an invoice to a client as soon as they start work on their behalf. As service providers the tax regulations stipulate that they must pay the VAT on this invoice as soon as it is raised, not when the client settles the bill. İf a lawyer feels that his client has a strong and reasonable case he can offer the client the option to pay half normal fees if he loses in exchange for an agreement that in the case of a ruling in their favour he receives ten to twelve percent of the compensation awarded. This conservative attitude combined with an attitude amongst judges that they won’t make anyone rich with large compensation awards make speculative cases thin on the ground. 

According to lawyer Tuğbay Öz Turkish people are more used to sorting problems out themselves and shy away from court cases which they regard as advertising their problems in public. İn many cases they rely on God to somehow redress the balance. On the popular Turkish forum www.webhatti.com under the subheading ‘Funny Things’ (komik-seyler) one member posted the following examples of how multi million dollar compensation cases would be handled in Turkey;

The American woman who successfully sued McDonalds for $2.5 million for not writing ‘Hot’ on their beverage containers after scalding her hand with their coffee.

İn Turkey: Someone would have applied toothpaste to the burn. İf she had continued to fuss one of the waiters would have given her a slap and shut her in the deep freezer. 

The American cancer patient who sued his doctors after he lived beyond the life expectancy they had given him.

İn Turkey: After the patient had applied for compensation he would have been whisked away and admitted to a public hospital. İf he failed to die of cancer here he would die fairly soon of some other infection picked up on his ward. 

The beer loving German who lodged a $10,000 court case against the beer manufacturers Anheuser-Busch because he claimed that their adverts indicated that the beer would win him female admirers but he had none.

İn Turkey: As soon as he started the case he would have featured predomianantly on the news and become a minor celebrity being interviewed on daytime TV magazine programs. His new found fame would get him a girlfriend and Anheuser-Busch would have been off the hook.  

One man who is no stranger to the courts is Prime Minister Tayyıp Erdoğan who has lodged a record number of compensation cases. He specifically targets journalists who write about him negatively but also the media in general and opposition party CHP (members of parliament) in particular. Between March 2003 when he came to power and March 2006 he had lodged seventy one defamation cases, won forty six of them and been awarded 254,000YTL (or £108,000). He has sued Star newspaper the most (sixteen times), then Yeni Çağ and followed by Aydınlık magazine but also made time to drag the Sabah, Akşam, Millyet, Vatan, Radikal, Evrensel, Ortadoğu and Güneş newspapers into court as well.  

Only last week yet another court case against CHP leader Deniz Baykal for ‘injuring his personal status and infringing on his personal rights’ lodged for 25,000YTL (or £10,500) was thrown out of court. İn general he sues for six times more than the courts actually award him. Some might call him touchy and accuse him of getting rich off the back of the cases but his supporters would say he is merely providing the Turkish public with lessons in how the rights of the individual can be protected.