An İstanbul court has acquitted three defendants in a retrial over their involvement in the 2013 anti-government Gezi Park protests after the country’s top appeals court overturned their sentences in 2023, the Evrensel daily reported on Tuesday.
The decision by the İstanbul 13th High Criminal Court on Tuesday concerns academic Ali Hakan Altınay, economist and activist Yiğit Ali Ekmekçi and architect Ayşe Mücella Yapıcı. They were retried on charges of violating a law on meetings and demonstrations.
In September 2023 the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of five defendants including prominent businessman and civil society leader Osman Kavala in the Gezi Park trial, while it overturned the convictions of Altınay, Ekmekçi and Yapıcı, who were subsequently released from prison under judicial supervision.
The three defendants had previously been sentenced to 18 years in the initial trial. The court ruled to acquit them on Tuesday following a decision to remove their judicial supervision measures in February 2024.
The İstanbul 13th High Criminal Court in April 2022 sentenced Kavala to life in prison and the seven other co-defendants to 18 years each on charges related to the anti-government Gezi Park protests of 2013.
They were convicted of attempting to overthrow the government for their alleged role in the protests, which began over an urban development plan in central İstanbul and spread to other cities in Turkey.
The ruling sparked international condemnation as well as protests across Turkey for being politically motivated.
The 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations, which took place in reaction to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s attempt to destroy one of the few green spaces left in İstanbul, quickly turned into a nationwide protest against the authoritarian policies of then-prime minister and current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Eleven protestors died and thousands more were injured as they were brutally suppressed by the police on Erdoğan’s instructions.
Turkey has refused to release Kavala despite a 2019 European Court of Human Rights ruling that found his detention was in pursuance of an “ulterior motive,” that of silencing him as a human rights defender. The non-implementation of the ruling prompted the Council of Europe’s (CoE) Committee of Ministers to launch an infringement procedure against Turkey in February 2022, which is still ongoing.
The protests have once again returned to Turkey’s agenda 12 years later with the recent arrest of Ayşe Barım, a prominent figure in Turkey’s television and film industry who works with a number of famous actors, due to her alleged role in the protests.
Barım is accused of “attempting to overthrow the Turkish Republic or prevent it from fulfilling its duties” as one of the alleged “organizers” of the protests. She denies the charges.