The Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights and the spokesperson of the European External Action Service (EEAS) denounced on Wednesday 19 February the re-arrest of philanthropist Osman Kavala, just hours after his acquittal in the trial of the Gezi Park protests.
“The hope I felt [Tuesday] after the acquittal of Osman Kavala in the Gezi trial was short-lived”, said Dunja Mijatović, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, in a statement. According to her, this new arrest, this time on charges relating to the attempted coup d'état of 15 July 2016, is “a perfect illustration of the acute problems of the Turkish judiciary and the situation of rights defenders”, dysfunctions to which she has just devoted a report, also published on Wednesday (see the report: http://bit.ly/2SHnqgn ).
Thus, “these new charges against Kavala” have, in her view, “no credibility”, and his arrest “amounts to ill-treatment”. The Commissioner therefore called on “the Turkish judiciary and the Council of Judges and Prosecutors to assume their responsibilities by not giving judicial confirmation to such abuses of criminal proceedings”.
The EEAS spokesman also criticised the Turkish decision. According to him, “the lack of credible grounds for re-arresting Osman Kavala and continuing his detention pending different charges further damages the credibility of Turkey’s judiciary”. “Judicial proceedings cannot be used as a means of silencing critical voices”, he warned in a statement, adding that the EU would continue to closely monitor ongoing trials.
The day before, several Members of the European Parliament welcomed the acquittal of 16 people, including Mr Kavala, in the Gezi Park case. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant and Véronique Leblanc)