Turkey's Constitutional Court made a landmark decision July 13. A law that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) passed some 16 months ago declaring all private university prep courses illegal was annulled. With this decision, the court not only saved Turkey’s private education sector from government intrusion but also proved that there are still some checks and balances left in the Turkish system.

The controversy over the prep courses had begun in the fall of 2013, when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suddenly vowed to close them all. Most high school students take these supplementary courses after graduating to prepare for the university entrance exams — the most important tests of their lives. Erdogan declared that the courses created an unnecessary workload for the students and exploited their quest for education. Yet as everyone knew, the real issue at stake was not education, but Erdogan’s political war with the Gulen movement, which operated about a quarter of all prep courses in Turkey. By late 2013, Erdogan had decided the movement, which was once his best ally, was now his worst enemy, and tried to minimize its influence by closing its prep courses, which he claimed also served as recruiting centers for new young members.

At that time, most Turkish liberals, including myself, opposed the law. We argued that the government can improve its own schools but cannot ban the supplementary education offered by the private sector and freely chosen by students and their families. One can dislike the Gulen movement and oppose its cadre-building within Turkey's bureaucracy, we argued, but this does not justify an attack on private enterprise. Now, the details of the new decision by the Constitutional Court have not yet been officially announced, but reports in the media suggest that it is based on this liberal point of view. The law, as the court reportedly decided, “represented a violation of the constitution regarding the articles related to the right to education and freedom of labor.”

But why did the Constitutional Court make such a decision? Did it side with the Gulen movement, or was it “infiltrated by Gulenists,” as pro-AKP propagandists have argued lately in the face of every Constitutional Court decision that displeased the government? Probably not, because the same court has made other recent rulings that conflicted with the political line of the Gulen movement — such as freeing imprisoned officers in the notorious “Sledgehammer” case and police officer Hanefi Avci. In fact, right after the ruling on the prep courses, the court rejected personal appeals by Gulen himself and Hidayet Karaca, an imprisoned journalist affiliated with the Gulen movement, about violations of their rights.