On 17 April, the Dutch Parliament voted in favour of a motion to block the EU’s Customs Union update with Turkey in the event that European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings for the release of former Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş and philanthropist Osman Kavala, in prison since 2016 and 2017 respectively, are not implemented.*
In an exclusive interview with Medya News, Dutch MP Kati Piri spoke about the reasons for the Dutch parliament decision in this motion, expounding on Turkey’s human rights situation and explaining how European states should handle their relations with the country.
Kati Piri is a Dutch Labour Party representative in the Dutch House of Representatives and the party’s spokesperson for foreign affairs and asylum. She was a member of the European Parliament serving as a rapporteur on Turkey’s EU membership from 2014 to 2021, and called for firm language from the EU towards Turkey after the 2016 coup attempt in the country.
Piri starts by emphasising the fact that Turkey’s decision to join the Council of Europe means that it is “obliged to respect all the verdicts of the European Court of Human Rights.”
The parliamentarian makes clear that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has ruled that Kavala and Demirtaş are innocent and need to be released immediately. She says that Turkey’s noncompliance with these rulings is “a problem when it comes to Turkey’s relations to the European Union” and states, “it needs to be a precondition that the verdicts of the European Court of Human Rights are being implemented and respected by Turkey before we can agree to modernising the customs union”.
On Turkey’s human rights, Piri refers to the lack of freedom of the press and the attacks on the political opposition in the country, noting the thousands imprisoned not for having committed crimes but simply for being politically active. “The human rights situation, the rule of law situation in Turkey is still a very big concern,” she concludes.
On the role of Turkey within NATO, Piri states that “there are many countries in NATO and some very dominant countries in NATO, which, for instance, have turned a blind eye or have supported military actions of Turkey” and that Turkey is “problematic because of its human rights records, problematic because of the military incursions we have seen where the Kurdish people have suffered a lot.”
She stresses the need for diplomatic pressure to encourage Turkey to comply with the decisions of the ECtHR, and asks European states to take their own values seriously and act in accordance with them in their relations with Turkey.
Regarding the recent police attacks on the Kurdish media in Belgium, Piri stresses the importance of the Kurdish media being able to report from Belgium and calls for the judicial grounds for these attacks to be made public, to ensure there was no political pressure brought to bear on the courts, saying this would be a really bad sign for the European Democracy.
*Selahattin Demirtaş is remanded in custody in connection with the Kobane trial, where dozens of elected politicians were arrested following protests against Turkey’s policies towards the actions of ISIS in Syria’s Kobane. Osman Kavala is a philantropist who has been sentenced to life imprisonment in the Gezi trial, which dealt with nationwide environmental protests that started in Gezi Park in Istanbul.
