The lawyer for 84-year-old sick prisoner Mehmet Emin Özkan, one of the names on the Turkish Human Rights Association’s list of sick prisoners, has made an application to the Constitutional Court for his release.
Özkan has been locked up in Turkish prisons for 26 years. He is currently being held in Diyarbakir D-Type Closed Prison. He suffers from numerous physical ailments such as heart, kidney and intestinal disorders. He has had five heart attacks and four bouts of angina since his imprisonment and he now has great difficulty meeting his personal hygiene needs. But the Turkish authorities still insist on keeping him in prison as part of their policy of not releasing sick prisoners until their dying breath.
He was sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment in the trial held at the one of the notorious State Security Courts (DGMs) that existed at the time. He was held responsible for the killing of a Turkısh brigadier general despite there being no evidence to that effect. Applications have been made to Turkey’s Forensic Medicine Institute (ATK) for medical reports to ease his release, but to no avail. He is still in prison despite insistent calls from human rights defenders, and now his lawyer, Serdar Çelebi, has applied to the Constitutional Court.
Stating that a report they received from a fully recognised state hospital to support the postponement of Özkan’s sentence has been consistently ignored by the ATK, Çelebi recalled that their latest application had been rejected on the basis that Özkan was “able to take phone calls”.
He said that sick detainees have given up hope on the ATK due to the unjust decisions issued by it.
“The ATK is not reliable, decisions issued by the ATK are made on political grounds. More attention needs to be paid to reports produced by universities or fully recognised hospitals. Arrangements need to be made in this matter. The ATK should not be dealing with these cases,” he said.
The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has released a video on its Twitter account to draw attention to Mehmet Emin Özkan’s situation.
Trial
On 22 October, 1993, following the assassination of a Turkish brigadier general by the name of Bahtiyar Aydın, the Turkish army organised a planned attack on the town of Lice, dozens of people were brutally murdered and almost all the houses and shops belonging to the Kurdish residents of the town were burned down and/or gutted.
Özkan was sentenced to life in prison after being tried for the killing of Aydın in Lice. The only evidence for his conviction was the testimony of two informants who later withdrew their statements. Despite the fact that his only language was Kurdish and he could not speak Turkish, his cross-examination was in Turkish.
Özkan moved away to Adana after the Lice massacre, due to the burning of his village and state oppression against the Kurds. Initially he was arrested for allegedly “helping an illegal organisation”. Two people alleged to be Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) members testified that they saw Özkan with a PKK group they claimed had participated in the Lice massacre (although it is now widely accepted that it was the Turkish army that systematically destroyed the town of Lice, rather than the PKK). Later these two people declared that they had given their testimony under duress. But in 1994, Konya DGM sentenced Özkan to life imprisonment for “defiling the unity and integrity of the state”, without even drawing up an indictment on this new charge.
The Supreme Court overturned the decision of Konya DGM because it had been made without an indictment, upon which, Konya DGM drew up an indictment of half a page, and once again passed exactly same sentence on Özkan. The Supreme Court, which had earlier overturned Ozkan’s case, this time upheld the sentence handed down with the half-page indictment.
After the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that trials in the DGMs were “contrary to the right to a fair trial” due to the presence of military members on the benches, new regulations were made, and Özkan was to be retried at Adana Criminal Court No.7. The sentence of life imprisonment was supposed to be lifted due to the pending retrial, but requests by lawyers for his release have been repeatedly denied.
Özkan’s case has been pending retrial for nearly nine years.
