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What does Turkey seek by subjecting Greece to its domestic law?

by George Tsoukalas, Lawyer

Does Turkey seek the subordination of Greece to its internal law? As the question may at first seem inconceivable, the answer in terms of a parable may be found in an imaginative Turkish fairy tale. According to it, once Nasreddin Hodjas went to his neighbor asking him to lend him his large cauldron for a few days. When Hodjas returned the cauldron to the neighbor, he put a smaller one inside it, telling him that he had supposedly “given birth to it”. A short time later, Hodjas went to the neighbor again and borrowed the large cauldron again. As time passed, the neighbor, worried because Hodjas did not return the cauldron, asked him: “- Hodja, where is my cauldron? Hasn’t it given birth?” Then, Hoxha sadly replied: "- I am very sorry, my friend, but I have bad news, because your cauldron has died!" In a similar way, Turkey seems to be seeking the end of international law as a system of rules applied to Greek-Turkish relations, and its replacement with a Turkic regional system of rules of law, which will be based on the imposition of the strongest.

In principle, the relations between Greece and Turkey are regulated as interstate relations by public international law. But how does a dominant trend of Turkish culture perceive current international law? According to a widespread Turkish view, public international law is a Eurocentric legal system, a creation of 17th-century European states, as crystallized after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and as previously formulated as an idea by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645).

The Ottoman Empire did not recognize the existence of this international legal order until the Treaty of Paris (1856). Until then, the Ottoman Empire negotiated and concluded agreements with European states, but not on the basis of the rules of public international law but of its own laws and customs within its own regulatory framework, the so-called "Siyar" (Siyar) related to the Islamic tradition, which determined the binding nature of peace treaties (sulh) and the observance of contracts (aman) concluded with foreign, non-Muslim states.

Although modern Turkey was founded with the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) as a state that recognizes the international legal order and is therefore subject to the modern rules of public international law, progressively, and especially after the invasion of Cyprus (1974), the traditional Turkish idea that Turks should apply their own legal order to their international environment, with their own natural rules, has re-emerged.

Besides, a cultural and international political pursuit of Turkey is the detachment of Greece from Europe and its return to the Turkish sphere of influence, interpreting modern Greece as a state creation of the imposition of the previous European order at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, rather than conversely modern Europe as a product of ancient Greece, according to the modern European perspective.

Can Turkey, as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, in the 21st century, once again replace international law with its own regional legal system in the geography where Hellenism is located? Can Turkey incorporate into its new "international" legal order the territory of Greece, in which internal Turkish law will apply, through sui generis regulations, reversing a sequence of international legal treaties, starting with the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and going back to the overthrow of the London Protocol (1830)?

Even if Turkey does not formally abolish either the Treaty of Lausanne as it had previously announced with "Vision 2023" or Greek independence as it is internationally recognized and has been in force for two centuries, it can gradually re-define Greece, ultimately subordinating, in part or in whole, Greek territory to Turkish administration, through a pioneering imposition of its state power on the territory of Greece.

As the President of Turkey stated during his official visit to Athens in 2017, he does not possess international law but he knows “political law”, obviously meaning the imposition of the unjust law of the strongest. And this, so that Turkish domestic law is progressively applied as a Turkic quasi-“international” law, initially informally and then explicitly, as superseding Greek national law or other sources of law, such as European Community law or international law, for various issues.

This Turkish quasi-"international law", that is, a Turkic regional system of law in the area of ​​Greece, Cyprus and, peripherally, Anatolia, may initially be constituted in the form of "rules" by threats and imperative decisions of the Turkish administration for the convenient disposition of the Greek armed forces vis-à-vis Turkey or for the limitation of the width of the Greek territorial sea and for the general regulation of the maritime zones of Greece through Turkish laws, which in the future may potentially reach, for example and hypothetically, the regulation of the right of Turkish citizens to buy and sell real estate in the Greek border areas, the determination of the sailings of liners in the Aegean Sea or even the regulation of Turkish investments in Greek territory, but also on issues of immunity, which will generally undermine Greek civil law, administrative law or even the criminal law of Greece.

All of this may surprise and seem fantastic today, but did not the same unreal surprise seize Greek society when, for example, the Blue Homeland was established? Could Turkey ever want to extend its will to impose regulations on other issues in Greece, which this time will touch the core of the daily social life of Greeks? Given that the known way for Turkey to gradually impose its national law on Greece as "international" is through its military power, this possibility cannot be ruled out.

Besides, the very concept of the state means, by its very nature, imposition and violence, unreasonable domination. In this case, initially Greece will not be abolished openly and in an impressive manner as a state, but over time, through a process that will be primarily rationally symbiotic and gracefully peaceful towards the threatened Greeks, but with a few occasional outbursts of violence or threats of using it whenever it sees fit, Turkey will limit, imperceptibly for the current generations of Greeks, but noticeably in terms of the future result, Greek sovereignty, which may perhaps be presented as valid under international law against other states but not to the same extent against the Turkish state and its internal legislation.

With what guiding principle and compass is Turkey moving forward in its pursuit of the progressive incorporation of Greece into its Turkic "international" legal order under formation, so that the future regulation of critical Greek issues can be carried out directly by the Turkish legal order?

As is known, Turkey has already successfully tested this original process of applying Turkish national law in Greece as quasi-"international", since the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. In principle, the imposition of the Turkish state on the Greek state is done simply by the archaic method of state imposition, through the threat of military force on Greek territory by the Turkish state, if Greece does not implement the Turkish decisions. Of course, this is a blatant violation of international law of the use of armed force by Turkey, as reflected in Article 2, paragraph 4 of the Charter of the United Nations, constituting customary international law, which, however, has not only not been condemned by either the Security Council or the General Assembly of the U.N.

In fact, Turkey essentially defined the Greek territorial sea in the Aegean Sea as only six (6) nautical miles wide, by virtue of the unanimous Decision of the Turkish National Assembly of June 8, 1995, which constitutes domestic law of Turkey, as subsequently registered in the United Nations Register under number A/50/256, S/1995/505. Of course, Greece may have initially been displeased and protested, but it ultimately seems to have compromised, and the June 8, 1995 Decision of the Turkish Grand National Assembly is informally observed by the Greek authorities, as Greece has since refrained from exercising this right, despite the fact that it has no such interest, and has even ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea through Law 2321/1995 (Government Gazette A' 136/23.06.1995). Furthermore, Greece seems to have already indirectly but clearly accepted that the issue of the extension of its territorial waters to twelve (12) nautical miles does not constitute its exclusive sovereign right, which is inherently non-negotiable under international law of the sea, but rather is subject to approval by Turkey, as can be deduced from the Greek-Turkish rounds of talks at the beginning of the 21st century, during which Turkey's consent was sought for a limited extension of Greek territorial waters, which was ultimately not achieved.

In addition, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, in defiance of applicable international law, Turkey also proceeded to the bilateral regulation with Libya of the Greek maritime zones, as de facto Turkish, in the Cretan Sea, through the signing on November 27, 2019 in Istanbul, of the so-called "Turkish-Lybian Memorandum" for the delimitation of an exclusive economic zone (EEZ), the ratification of which is still pending from Libya. Citing the "Turkish-Libyan Memorandum", Turkey imposed, contrary to the rules of public international law, the suspension of the laying of submarine electrical interconnection cables between Greece and Cyprus, by sending five Turkish warships off the coast of Kasos (July 22-24, 2024) to impede Greek research and work outside the Greek territorial sea zone of six (6) nautical miles, without Greece reacting, as it limited itself to sending a frigate to monitor the situation. Moreover, Turkey seeks, through threats of armed force, to re-determine the disposition of the Greek armed forces, so that its interests are not affected, on the Greek islands of the Aegean Sea, part of which it simultaneously claims as of allegedly unspecified status, according to the Turkish theory of gray zones, especially after the Imia Crisis on January 30-31, 1996.

Furthermore, Turkey invokes inactive and outdated provisions for the demilitarization of the Greek islands, such as Article 13 of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) for the islands of the Eastern Aegean and Article 14 of the Paris Peace Treaty (1947) for the Dodecanese, although it is not even a party to the latter. In fact, in 2026, Turkey announced the adoption of special internal legislation, under which all Greek maritime zones in the Eastern Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean will be characterized as Turkish, and will be regulated in detail based on the rules of Turkish internal law.

However, the Aegean Sea, like the Cretan and Carpathian Seas, are not internal waters of Turkey, so that they are regulated by internal Turkish legislation instead of international law, as Turkey seeks, by replacing the rules of international law with a modern version of the peculiar Ottoman legal order of the past. Of course, the imposition of such an “international” order on Greek-Turkish relations, which would be regulated by the internal law of Turkey, will never be subject as an interstate dispute to the jurisdiction of any International Court.

In conclusion, Turkey does not prioritize public international law as its primary system of rules, which it remembers as a historical exotic imposition on it by the competitive Europe, but considers the military power of the Turks to be of paramount importance, which it perceives as a means for imposing whatever rules Turkey itself can primarily shape in the geography where it exercises it, in order to regulate through its own laws a regional Turkic legal order, to which it seeks to progressively subsume Greece.