Strong protests were voiced following the announcement of an Istanbul court’s ruling in the ‘Gezi Case’ in Turkey on Monday.
Reacting to the decision of the Istanbul court to sentencing one of the accused to aggravated life imprisonment and the others to 18 years each in prison in the absence of any evidence, Ahmet Şık addressed a small crowd outside the courthouse saying:
“If you could have filled these grounds today, I’m not telling this to people already present here, I’m telling it to people who will be watching this… If you could have filled this space, they wouldn’t be able to reach that verdict so easily. Today you have to fill these grounds, tomorrow there will be another place to fill. We have nothing to lose but our comforts. If you do not sacrifice that, you are bound to lose everything.”
Ayşe Hür, a prominent writer and researcher, said to Artı Gerçek:
“The ruling in the Gezi Case marks the heights of the doctrine of the ‘criminal enemy law’, theoreticised first by the German jurist (!) of Nazism, Carl Schmitt, and then by another German jurist Günther Jakobs in the 1980s, which has been exercised in Turkey influenced by Nazi Germany. From this point onwards, I will never ever refer to concepts like justice, evidence, trial, court and ruling when Turkey is concerned.” *
Hür also underlined on Twitter that the judge who opposed the recent verdict had failed to vote for the dismissal of one of the judges who had been revealed to be a deputy candidate for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the general elections.
Garo Paylan, MP for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), said to Alin Ozinian on the Webcast of + Gerçek TV.
“This court ruling is the clearest indication that there remains not even the tiniest bit of law in Turkey any more. A court can sentence one of our friends to aggravated life imprisonment without a single piece of evidence, merely in line with instructions from the political administration. The court can do that despite the European Court of Human Rights’s order for his immediate release. It can sentence our other friends to 18 years in prison each.”
* The concept of ‘Feindstrafrecht’, or ‘Criminal Law of the Enemy’ was outlined in 1985 by the German criminal law professor and legal philosopher Günther Jakobs.
