Turkish human rights lawyers targeted with threats, detention
Turkey’s defence and human rights lawyers are being increasingly targeted through abusive criminal investigations and unfair prosecutions while accused of the alleged crimes of their clients, wrote Stefan Simanowitz, Amnesty International’s media manager for Europe.
Citing multiple examples of
targeted lawyers such as Taner Kılıç, İdil Eser, Günal Kurşun and Özlem
Dalkıran, Simanowitz in a article he penned for Euronews on Sunday said
politically motivated verdicts were posing an increased danger to Turkey’s
legal community.
Kılıç, the honorary Chair of
Amnesty Turkey, was arrested in June 2018 on charges of membership of a
terrorist organisation and released after serving 432 days in pre-trial
detention.
Fellow lawyers Eser, Kurşun,
Dalkıran were also convicted in “politically motivated verdicts’’ Simonowitz
said and sentenced to over one year in prison for "assisting the Fethullah
Gülen terrorist organisation," a religious group accused by Ankara of
orchestrating the failed coup attempt of July 2016.
Noting the cases are not rare,
Simanowitz said detaining lawyers had become routine practice in the country,
adding “hundreds of lawyers are now believed to be in pre-trial detention or
serving prison terms in Turkey’s overcrowded jails.’’
A recent examples of the crackdown
on lawyers in the detention in November of dozens of lawyers as part of an
ongoing investigation into the Democratic Society Congress (DTK) which the
authorities claim is linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an
armed group that has been in war in Turkey for almost four decades.
“The targeting of defence lawyers with criminal
charges for executing their duties contravenes the UN Basic Principles on the
Role of Lawyers and critically undermines the right to a fair trial,’’
Simonowitz wrote.
Turkey is eroding the basic tenets of the rule of law, he noted, by way of “abusive investigations, arbitrary detentions and unfounded prosecutions under vaguely defined anti-terrorism laws.’’