Having been living in Turkey since 2013, Munip Ali was detained over his tweets criticising Turkish government.
“This scene is neither in Palestine nor Al-Aqsa. Do you know where this shameful incident took place? In Turkey, Gaziantep. Bashar Al-Assad’s soldiers were doing the same to Muslims praying in God’s homes in Syria,” Ali tweeted on May 3 sharing the footage of Turkish police attacking the members of an Islamist religious group, named Furkan Foundation with tear gases during their moments of prayer in a Gaziantep mosque in southeastern Turkey.
https://twitter.com/Munip_Algilha/status/1389192629850628098?s=20
A Turkish court decided Ali is to be “deported” over accusations of “provoking the public to hatred and animosity.”
Ali has been kept in a removal centre in Turkey’s western province of Izmir since May 6.
Ali’s lawyer Meral Kaban, also a member lawyer of the Association of Lawyers for Freedom, shared information that Ali was transferred to another removal centre in Turkey’s eastern province of Erzurum on the night of May 7, MA reports.
“My client has been given no information beforehand, he was told, ‘get up, we are leaving’ and he was taken. When my client called me, he had no idea where he was being taken to. As I asked him on the phone, he learned at that moment that he was being taken to Erzurum removal centre,” Kaban said.
Kaban reacted to this hurried and clandestine night transfer of his client, defining the process as “unjust” and “illegal”.
“My client has been taken further away from his lawyer and from his family. This is a way to punish him. We are waiting for the legal process to start. Courts are closed, there is not enough personnel working. We will wait for this lockdown to end.”
Kaban also informed that they have demanded Ali to be transferred back to the removal centre in Izmir from Erzurum.
Deportations have began to be used more as a tool to intimidate politically active refugees in Turkey and Ali’s situation has been the latest, but not the first example of Turkish government’s increasing pressure against refugees.
Recently another Turkish court ruled a deportation decision for four refugees from Iran on charges of “acting against public order” on grounds that they had taken part in a peaceful women’s protest against Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, which caused public outrage in the country.
