State Minister and Turkey’s chief European Union negotiator Egemen Bağış has announced that the Secretariat-General for EU Affairs (ABGS) has offered Turkish-Armenian Leo Süren Halepli the position of EU specialist. Halepli was notified of the offer on March 1 but has not yet responded with a decision.
Bağış spoke with reporters on March 2 while on his way to Portugal for an official visit. He elaborated that Halepli had originally passed a written test and interview in 2009 to join the ABGS office in Turkey. However, offers could not be made at the time as another candidate, who took the same exam but did not pass, had lodged a court case in February of last year.
“The administrative court granted the application, which was then appealed by the ABGS office at the 11th Chamber of the Council of State, which then overturned the administrative court’s decision. As we no longer have any obstacles in front of us, we have been able to contact the 40 people who were supposed to work as EU specialists. We also contacted Leo Halepli, who has a very good resume in that regard, and offered him a position at the secretariat. He said he will consider the offer and respond shortly,” Bağış was quoted by the Yeni Şafak daily as saying.
The state minister said 400 applications were originally submitted for the EU specialist positions, of which 40 people, including Halepli, were successful in both the written exam and the interview. He added that they were not aware of the ethnicity of the applicants until the exam results were reviewed and that candidates were shortlisted to the 80 people who scored the highest on the exam.
“Halepli was not referred to us by the Armenian community or anyone else. He used his natural right as a citizen to apply for the position,” he said, as quoted by the same daily.
Halepli, who was born in İstanbul in 1981 and graduated from Robert College in 1999, is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics and is also a country manager for Turkey at the London-based consultancy firm Marker Global.
With Halepli’s potential appointment to the position, an unofficial policy of discrimination, which has kept members of minority groups out of state posts, has been brought into the spotlight. Although many people of Armenian descent were appointed to civil service positions in the era of the Ottoman Empire, there was a state policy in the Turkish Republic of not allowing non-Muslims to state posts in accordance with the 1926 Memurin Law.
The discriminatory law was changed in 1965 to state that a public official needed only to be a Turkish citizen. But intimidated by the state, non-Muslims have been reluctant to seek official state positions; some have taken advantage of the change to pursue work in state universities but not in civil servant positions.
Turkey has been working to thaw the ice between the state and ethnic and religious minorities since the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) swept to power in 2002. Since then, the government has emphasized on many occasions that it is against both ethnic and religious nationalism and maintains impartiality toward all ethnic and religious groups in society.
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