An Istanbul court on Monday (April 25th) sentenced businessman and patron Osman Kavala, designated as a public enemy by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and seven of his co-accused to 18 years in prison for “attempting to overthrow the government”. They were jailed after the hearing. Berlin asked Monday evening for its “ immediate release “.
With our correspondent in Istanbul, Anne Andlauer
Osman Kavala has already spent nearly four and a half years in preventive detention. Acquitted in a first trial in February 2020, he was prosecuted for his alleged involvement in the demonstrations of the Gezi Park, in 2013and the 2016 failed coup.
His imprisonment has become a symbol of the leaden screed that has befallen Turkish civil society ever since. A thunder of whistles also sounded in the crowded courtroom of the Istanbul Assize Court when the verdict was announced.
The defendants and their lawyers had repeated it throughout the hearing: this verdict was to be a test for Turkish justice and its degree of independence with regard to political power.
Osman Kavala, who spoke by videoconference from his prison, denounced just before the verdict an instrumentalization of justice to perpetrate ” an attack ” against him. He recalled that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) had been calling for his release since December 2019, judging that he was detained for political reasons.
Since his imprisonment in November 2017, Osman Kavala’s lawyers have denounced a succession of investigations opened on identical bases, indictments devoid of evidence but filled with inconsistencies and extrapolations, attempts to merge his trial with others and speeches against political power.
All this with the aim of prolonging the detention of this man who has therefore become, in spite of himself, a symbol for the opposition and a pet peeve for power.
During this last hearing, the defense lawyers also revealed that one of the judges had tried, in 2018, to be a legislative candidate on the lists of the AKP, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. .
►Also listen: The Council of Europe hopes for the release of Osman Kavala, in Turkey