Justice & Law Quote by Ahmet Necdet Sezner

A warning dressed up as a definition of modernity: you do not get to call yourself contemporary while governing like an anxious regime. Sezner’s phrasing is doing two jobs at once. On the surface, it’s technocratic and forward-looking, the language of standards and “demands,” as if modernization were an objective checklist. Underneath, it’s a blunt moral indictment of state habits that have become normal enough to need euphemism: “elements which resemble a police state” is carefully indirect, a lawyerly way to name coercion without triggering the full panic of naming names.

The verb choice matters. “Abandon” isn’t reform, tweak, or calibrate; it’s renunciation. That signals both urgency and an awareness that these practices are not accidental excesses but structural tools. Sezner is also framing liberty not as a luxury but as a prerequisite for legitimacy. “We can’t meet the demands” implies a world watching, and a domestic public increasingly unwilling to trade rights for order.

Context does the rest. As Turkey’s president (and a former chief justice), Sezner occupied a role with limited day-to-day power but heavy symbolic weight, especially in a political culture where security apparatuses, emergency measures, and restrictions on expression have often been justified as necessary to protect the state. By tying “modern society” to the dismantling of police-state reflexes, he flips the script: the real threat to national progress isn’t dissent, it’s the state’s addiction to control.