A Turkish court has rejected all the requests made by lawyers in Wednesday’s hearing in the case of the assassination of prominent Kurdish lawyer and human rights defender Tahir Elçi.
Elçi, who was serving as president of the Diyarbakır Bar Association at the time, died on 28 November 2015 during a clash between Turkish forces and Kurdish militants in the Sur district of Diyarbakır (Amed), though the killing is believed by any to have been intentional. The fatal incident occurred shortly after Elçi had advocated an end to the violence during a press conference. In the case investigating his death, three police officers have been charged with reckless manslaughter and a fugitive suspect, alleged to be a member of the PKK, has been charged with possible premeditated murder.
The prosecution has yet to make a statement, saying it needs more time to prepare. Legal representatives have again pressed for an inspection of the site and have asked to see CCTV footage from a nearby restaurant to shed light on the circumstances surrounding Elçi’s death. They want to establish the presence of deleted data and call for the testimony of witnesses, including Ahmet Davutoğlu, the prime minister at the time of the incident, who in September 2021 publicly described Elçi’s murder as a political assassination. The lawyers requested that Davutoğlu testify in court, and the court agreed to this request on 15 June 2023, but at an interim hearing on 19 September 2023, the decision was reversed, without prior notice to the intervening legal team, a ruling that was later upheld by the court despite objections from the Elçi family lawyers.
Zahide Beydağı, one of the intervening lawyers, expressed her dissatisfaction with the repeated rejection of their requests and stressed the importance of examining witnesses and evidence to ensure justice. Nahit Eren, the current president of the Diyarbakır Bar Association, echoed these sentiments, criticising the court’s failure to carry out thorough investigations, including on-site inspections and video analyses.
The court opted to postpone further proceedings until 12 June after rejecting requests from the lawyers.
In his speech to the court, Mehmet Emin Aktar, a previous president of the Diyarbakır Bar Association, asked a pointed question: “Why the hesitation in the visit to the crime scene?”
“None of us in this courtroom has any expectation of justice,” Aktar declared. “Just expose who is responsible for the death of Tahir Elçi. If you have no intention of delivering justice, then do not do so. With 37 years of legal experience, all I ask is that you expose Elçi’s killers. Has there been a single piece of evidence that has been thoroughly examined? Despite the tireless efforts of my colleagues, my only request remains: identify those responsible for the murder of Tahir Elçi.”
Before and after the assassination
Elçi’s assassination followed the collapse of a two-year peace process when conflicts between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants flared up.
Turkey carried out large-scale police and military operations accompanied by curfews in the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country. Dozens of local people were killed, and the response of the Kurdish militants was to put up an armed resistance.
Elçi called for an end to the violence at a press conference in front of the historic four-legged minaret in the Sur district of Diyarbakır, but as he was speaking a gunfight broke out between police and Kurdish militants and he was shot in the back of the head.
In October 2015, Elçi had said on live television that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was not a terrorist organisation, but an armed political movement with political demands and significant social support. These comments led to a court case against Elçi and he was temporarily detained on charges of terrorism.
Elçi was killed only five weeks later. The trial relating to Elçi’s murder began more than four years after the incident. In contrast, it had taken just nine days for the Turkish judiciary to prosecute Tahir Elçi for the comments he had made on a live television programme, which his lawyers say made him a political target.
The prosecution has demanded two to six years for three police officers and three times aggravated life imprisonment and 45 years for the alleged PKK member.
The Forensic Architecture Department of the University of London prepared a report in 2019 after examining photographs taken by journalists at the scene of the murder. According to their investigations, the report identified three members of the police as perpetrators of the crime, one of them being a “certain perpetrator”. The evidence presented in the report clearly shows that the suspected PKK member did not shoot Tahir Elçi.
