Ten people were arrested in an operation targeting people affiliated faith-based Gülen movement amidst all the discussion of amnesty to prison inmates vis-à-vis Coronavirus pandemic.
The operation is carried out within the scope of a counterterrorism investigation conducted by the Terrorism and Organized Crime Bureau of the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Thursday.
The new arrest wave came at a time when government presented a bill to reduce the number of prison inmates amidst fear of Coronavirus pandemic’s spread to the country’s overcrowded prisons. Currently Turkish prisons house some 300 thousand inmates, a number far exceeding their 200 thousand capacity, a circumstance which makes the prison inmates more vulnerable to the pandemic.
10 persons, 8 of whom were women were detained in Istanbul due to the “activities aimed at keeping up the morale and motivation of the members of the Gülen movement, re-energising them, providing financial support to the prison inmates and their families,” the agency reported.
According to the Anadolu news agency, the police concluded that the suspects held gatherings, came together in shopping malls to prevent being identified, preferred face to face meetings instead of using communication devices, donated money they collected to the inmates of prison and their families in need.
“The police seized digital materials, 2 F-series US 1-dollar bills, organisational documents and unpacked mobile phones obtained at home and body search of the suspects as criminal evidence,” the agency stressed.
In line with the new evidence thus obtained 28 suspects were detained, including a woman police officer, who had contact with the organization and was in active duty. In the meantime, it was noted that the suspects supported one of the previous detainees by opening a hashtag on the social media accounts.
The prosecutor’s office, which carried out the investigation, sent all 28 suspects to the Istanbul Magistrate’s Court, demanding their arrest on the charge of “being member of an armed terrorist organization”. The Istanbul Magistrate’s Court arrested 10 of the detainees including the incumbent police officer, releasing the other 18 suspects by imposing judicial control mechanisms on them. Thus, they have to report to local police station periodically and are banned from traveling abroad.
The government’s bill reportedly provides overt or covert amnesty to a broad range of criminals including sex offenders and drug dealers but excludes ‘political prisoners’, to wit, those who are convicted of terrorism-related crimes and crimes against the constitutional order. It practically means that tens of thousands of dissidents, journalists, political activists, politicians, academics and civil servants, imprisoned on flimsy terrorism-related charges will not benefit from this regulation.
This move attracted the ire of human rights organisations, relatives of the prisoners and the international community. An important warning came from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on March 25, 2020 who called on the governments to “release every person detained without sufficient legal basis, including political prisoners and others detained simply for expressing critical or dissenting views.”
Prominent Turkish human right activists and lawyers indicated that Turkish judges and prosecutors are too quick and wanton in resorting to pre-trial detention as a preventive mechanism when it comes to politically motivated charges, a fact graphically evidenced by this recent Gülenist arrest wave. Arresting people because they organised charity works, or they tried to keep up the morale and motivation of the families of the prisoners, or collected donations to the prisoners or their family members reduced to dire conditions, or they possessed F-series US 1-dollar bills billions of which are in circulation throughout the world can, after all, hardly qualify as a sound legal evidence for pre-trial detention.
Acting on this, Prof. Adem Sözüer, a criminal law expert, has earlier urged Turkish judges and prosecutors to employ judicial control mechanisms in the first place instead of haphazardly dealing out pre-trial detention orders as a step forward towards reducing the population of the prison inmates.
It is widely accepted that the Turkish government misused its notorious counter-terrorism laws to crackdown on dissidents. International community such as Council of Europe, the Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights, UN bodies and NGOs have time and again indicated at this fact, calling Turkey to bring its counter-terrorism related legislation in line with the international human rights standards. Turkey has so far turned a deaf ear to these calls.
President Erdoğan of Turkey has been persecuting the adherents of the Gülen movement, led by US based Turkish-Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen, who has been at loggerheads with the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan, since corruption investigations of 17-25 December 2013 where he, his son, 4 of his ministers and other AKP notables were either incriminated or implicated. Dismissing these investigations of tremendous scale as a Gülenist conspiracy, he designated the Gülen movement as an armed terrorist organisation, seized all Gülen-inspired media outlets and a bank owned partially by people affiliated to the movement. After the 15 of July 2016 coup attempt of which he accused Gülen as the mastermind – an accusation strongly denied by Gülen – he launched a witch hunt against the movement, thus dismissing some 150 thousand government officials including teachers, doctors, academics, lawyers, journalists, police officers and military personnel with non-justiciable cabinet decrees, locking up hundreds of thousands of them and expropriating their assets.
The post Gulenist witch hunt in full swing in Turkey amidst amnesty talk for prisoners appeared first on Stockholm Center for Freedom.
from Stockholm Center for Freedom https://stockholmcf.org/gulenist-witch-hunt-in-full-swing-in-turkey-amidst-amnesty-talk-for-prisoners/
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