Justice in the Dock.(European Union watches case against former member of parliament Leyla Zana for signs of judicial corruption, Turkey)

Officially, Leyla Zana was the one on trial in Ankara's State Security Court No. 1 late last month. The former M.P., a Kurd, was imprisoned in 1994 for alleged "membership in an illegal terrorist organization." Her case is now being retried after the European Court of Human Rights found her original conviction to be "grievously flawed." So in many ways the real defendant isn't Zana; it's the Turkish justice system.

The stakes for Turkey in this unofficial proceeding are huge. For the real jury is not the state-appointed judges who will decide Zana's fate. It's the gallery of Western diplomats, members of the European Parliament, human-rights advocates and the media who gather for each hearing to witness the proceedings. Their charge: that despite much- vaunted reforms passed by Parliament this summer guaranteeing free speech and other basic rights, Turkey isn't serious about modernizing the ultraconservative (and sometimes corrupt) judiciary that must enforce those new laws. And that, the critics say, makes them meaningless--a conclusion that could well derail Ankara's quest to join the European Union.

Turkey's ruling AK Party came to power last year promising to do everything it could to get the country into Europe. It scrapped the death penalty, lifted bans on broadcasting in Kurdish and other non- Turkish languages, wrote new laws protecting minorities and threw out a slew of repressive human-rights laws that, in the past, had been used to imprison political offenders on flimsy evidence, including Kurds, nationalists and leftists. Much to the amazement of many in Brussels, AK pushed through these changes against fierce opposition from the country's military and conservative political leaders, opening on paper at least one of the most revolutionary chapters in modern Turkey's history. But that's the problem. The reforms are still largely on paper. Turkey's judiciary has been slow to put the new laws into action. Prosecutors continue to arraign suspects for crimes that should no longer exist. And the police, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report, continue to regularly torture suspects and deny them basic rights.

As the European Union prepares to give Turkey a start date for accession negotiations, it is keeping a wary eye on the trial of Leyla Zana. In 1991 she became the first Kurdish woman ever elected to Turkey's Parliament--and quickly sparked outrage while taking her oath of office for calling on Kurds and Turks to work together to "build democracy" in Kurdish, the language of a fifth of Turkey's population. Soon after, the party she represented, the pro-Kurdish People's Labor Party, was outlawed on the ground that it promoted "ethnic separatism." Zana and three other M.P.s were accused of colluding with the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which was then waging a bloody guerrilla war against the Turkish military; they were convicted and jailed for 15 years.

The main evidence against Zana came from a former guard at a PKK training camp in Lebanon, who claimed in a written statement that he had seen her there in October 1991. That witness, Ecdet Pacal, never appeared in court at the original trial. Nor is he due to appear at Zana's new trial--which hinders the defense strategy of knocking down the flawed (and possibly fabricated) prosecution evidence criticized by the European Court of Human Rights. "There will ...