MLSA - Prison sentences were given for 28 defendants, among whom are members of the Association of Libertarian Jurists (ÖHD) and members of the Association for Solidarity with Families of Detainees (TUAD). In the final hearing decided by the Istanbul 14th High Criminal Court, while acquittal decisions were made for 10 defendants, convictions were issued for 28 defendants.
The verdict was announced in the 10th year in the hearings that started in June 2016, after the operation carried out in March 2016.
Lawyer Ramazan Demir was sentenced to 10 years and 15 months, Zübeyde Teker to 10 years and 6 months, and Mahmut Doğu to 19 years in prison. These three individuals were the defendants who received the highest prison sentences in the case.
Participating in the program Çetele hosted by Onur Öncü on MLSA TV, ÖHD Co-Chair Lawyer Serhat Çakmak evaluated the decision made by the court. Çakmak emphasized that the decision was not legal, but political.
Çakmak said: “For five years, can a person's phone be wiretapped more than forty times through extensions? This is not something that can be accepted within the logic of law. There is no legal basis for the extension of wiretapping orders. These procedures, which lack legal basis, constitute unlawful evidence.”
Speaking also about the legal developments in the process, Çakmak said: “In the one-and-a-half-year process, we are telling the courts this: The basic expectation from you here is not to do what is, but to do what ought to be. That is, even if the process had not taken place, we stated that a libertarian perspective should be reflected in court decisions in line with the decisions of the ECtHR and the Constitutional Court. However, regarding these matters, nothing has happened in the courts in the past one and a half years. The courts' perspective is not to take any steps unless a specific law comes into force. If we have a judicial practice that does not even implement what ought to be, then we need to see the concern created by the level reached in the relationship between judiciary and coup in Turkey.”
You can watch the Çetele program broadcast on MLSA TV on YouTube.
