Turkey was condemned on Tuesday by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for having imprisoned two judges who had released in 2015 people suspected of belonging to a group deemed terrorist by Ankara.
The European court found a violation of Article 5.1 (right to liberty and security) and ordered Ankara to pay each of the judges 5,000 euros for non-pecuniary damage, she said in a press release. The applicants, Mustafa Baser and Metin Özcelik, practiced at the material time in criminal courts in Istanbul. In 2015, they participated in the decision to release the boss of a press group, Hidayet Karaca, as well as around sixty police officers arrested at the end of 2014 for having, according to justice, plotted against the Turkish president.
They were all suspected of belonging to the “Fethullahist Terrorist Organization/Parallel State Structure”, indicates the ECHR. The two judges were in turn suspected of belonging to this movement of the preacher Fethullah Gülen, installed in the United States and considered by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the instigator of the coup attempt of July 2016. Formerly an ally Invaluable to Recep Erdogan, Fethullah Gülen was subsequently accused by the Turkish authorities of having spread the suspicions of corruption that targeted the government in December 2013, when Recep Erdogan was still prime minister.
Arrested in 2015, the two judges were sentenced in 2017 to 10 years in prison for “belonging to a terrorist organization” and “abuse of power”, recalls the Court in its press release. In its decision, which concerns only their pre-trial detention, the ECHR notably pointed to the “illegality” of this detention and “the absence of plausible reasons (…) to suspect them of having committed an offense”.
