Jailed for life without the possibility of parole, Turkish civil society leader Osman Kavala said Friday he still believed Turkey would one day restore democratic norms, as he marked seven years behind bars.
The imprisonment of the 67-year-old, Paris-born intellectual has prompted repeated protests from global rights groups and the West, with his fate symbolizing Turkey’s drift from democratic norms.
Kavala was a relatively unknown patron of culture and the arts until his arrest in October 2017 on a series of charges ranging from spying to funding protests to participating in a failed coup in 2016.
He was ultimately sentenced to life in prison in 2022 over a wave of 2013 anti-government protests that posed the first serious challenge to the increasingly dominant rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time.
“I have now completed my seventh year in prison. During this time, I have endured a judicial process that entirely violated the presumption of innocence, relying on baseless accusations and false statements,” Kavala wrote in an open letter.
“True consolation for me will be seeing progress toward the rule of law in my country. I believe this will happen.”
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ordered Kavala’s release in 2019 ruling, saying his arrest was aimed at silencing him and deterring other human rights defenders. Turkey has ignored it.
In a statement Friday, Human Rights Watch, the Human Rights Litigation Support Project and the International Commission of Jurists reiterated calls for his conviction to be overturned and for his “immediate release.”
“Turkey’s continued unlawful detention of … Osman Kavala is a result of prosecutors and courts effectively operating under the political control of the government,” they wrote in a third-party intervention to the ECtHR.
Last year the Council of Europe, Europe’s leading human rights organization, awarded Kavala its top rights prize, in a move seeking to highlight Turkey’s refusal to abide by ECtHR rulings.
Ankara’s refusal to implement the court’s rulings has strained ties with its Western allies.
The Council of Europe has launched infringement proceedings against Turkey over Kavala’s case, which could possibly see it expelled from the organization.
Kavala has always denied the charges against him, insisting Friday he had done nothing wrong and that the charges against him were “politically” motivated.
“[The] judicial authorities believe that they have the power to hand out punishments to those they find undesirable, even though they know those people did not commit any crime,” he wrote.
© Agence France-Presse