A former member of Turkey’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, has been sent to prison to serve a sentence due to his links to the faith-based Gülen movement, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
The former court member, identified as Ramazan E., was detained in the western province of Afyonkarahisar on Thursday. He had been expelled from public service through a government decree issued following a coup attempt in July 2016 and had been given a prison sentence of seven-and-a-half years on terrorism charges due to his alleged links to the Gülen movement.
The Gülen movement is accused by the Turkish government and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of masterminding the failed coup and is labeled a “terrorist organization,” although the movement denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Following the coup attempt, judges and prosecutors were among the first group of more than 130,000 public servants who were fired. A total of 4,156 judges and prosecutors were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
The crackdown on the real or perceived members of the Gülen movement continues unabated even seven years of the coup attempt despite rulings from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which found rights violations in the prosecution of the Gülen-affiliated people and criminal evidence used against them to be legally insufficient.