The story of the Divan-ı Harb-i Örfî tribunals and their successors is not merely a chapter in Ottoman legal history. It is, at its core, a cautionary narrative about the fragility of law when it collides with the imperatives of empire, politics, and power. It demonstrates how justice — a concept presumed to be universal, impartial, and transcendent — can be manipulated, redirected, or extinguished when subordinated to interests beyond itself.
From the vantage point of a century later, several fundamental lessons emerge.
I. Law Without Sovereignty Is an Illusion
The Divan-ı Harb-i Örfî courts were born into a context where Ottoman sovereignty had already been fatally compromised. Foreign fleets occupied Istanbul, Allied high commissioners dictated terms, and the government of Damat Ferit Paşa acted more as a collaborator than as an autonomous executive. Under these conditions, “justice” became a performance: a series of public trials meant to placate the victors rather than to establish truth through legal means.
The second tribunals, launched under Ahmet Tevfik Paşa, were a sincere attempt to reclaim judicial sovereignty — to re-anchor the legal process in Ottoman law, procedure, and evidentiary norms. Yet they too foundered, not for lack of will or capacity, but because sovereignty itself had been hollowed out. When a state lacks control over its defendants, its evidence, and its judicial processes, it cannot meaningfully administer justice. The British removal of suspects to Malta and the withholding of critical documentation illustrate this principle starkly: law without sovereignty is not law, but theater.
II. Occupation Justice as Historical Evidence: A Methodological Caution
The Istanbul tribunals also illuminate a key methodological challenge for historians. Court records are invaluable sources — they preserve testimony, document official attitudes, and reflect contemporary legal reasoning. But they are not oracles. They must be read critically, with close attention to the contexts in which they were produced, the purposes they served, and the pressures under which they operated.
The historian’s task is therefore twofold. First, to interrogate tribunal records as products of power — shaped by the political forces of their time. Second, to cross-examine those records against independent archival sources, demographic data, and diplomatic correspondence. Only through this triangulation can we approach a reliable reconstruction of the past.
The fate of the Malta prosecutions is particularly instructive in this regard. If the evidence generated by the Divan-ı Harb-i Örfî tribunals had been reliable, the British Crown Prosecutor would have pursued indictments. Instead, after two years of searching Ottoman, Allied, and American archives, the Attorney General concluded that “no evidence is available which would be sufficient to sustain a charge” (FO 371/6506, 29 July 1921). That negative result — rarely highlighted in nationalist narratives — is itself a crucial historical fact.
III. Justice as a Mirror of Power
The arc of Ottoman postwar justice illustrates a larger pattern visible in many historical contexts: the tension between justice as principle and justice as instrument. The former aspires to universality, impartiality, and truth. The latter is shaped by expediency, ideology, and geopolitical calculation. In occupied Istanbul, the latter triumphed over the former.
This dynamic would recur throughout the twentieth century. The Leipzig trials after World War I, the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals after World War II, and the ad hoc tribunals of the 1990s (ICTY, ICTR) each reveal, in different ways, the interplay between genuine legal aspiration and political will. In this continuum, the Ottoman experience — often overlooked — offers a stark early example: a case where the victors demanded justice but simultaneously dismantled the conditions necessary for it to occur.
IV. Conclusion: A Call for Historical Discipline
In the end, the historian’s responsibility is not to vindicate nations, ideologies, or contemporary narratives, but to reconstruct events as faithfully as the evidence allows. That evidence shows that the Divan-ı Harb-i Örfî tribunals were deeply flawed instruments of political retribution, and that the “Second Tribunals” represented a serious but ultimately thwarted attempt to restore legality under conditions of occupation. It also shows that imperial powers — in this case, Britain — played a decisive role not only in shaping those outcomes but in foreclosing the very justice they claimed to seek.
The lesson is sobering but necessary. Justice cannot be manufactured by foreign dictate, nor can it survive in the absence of sovereignty. Legal processes that serve political ends may produce verdicts, but they do not necessarily produce truth. And for historians, truth — provisional, contested, and evidence-bound — must remain the ultimate standard.