An İstanbul court has ruled for the acquittal of 46 people from the Saturday Mothers, a group of activists and relatives seeking to learn the fate of loved ones who disappeared while in police custody in Turkey in the 1990s, who were tried for participating in a protest in August 2018, the Anka news agency reported.
The protest on August 25, 2018 was the group’s 700th weekly vigil in İstanbul’s Galatasaray Square in Beyoğlu.
It was subject to a ban by the Beyoğlu district governor’s office on the grounds that the authorities had not been notified 48 hours prior to the vigil.
Police broke up the gathering using tear gas and water cannons and detained 46 people who were later released but indicted two years later, in 2020, on charges of “attending illegal meetings and marches without weapons and failing to disperse despite warnings.” They faced a prison sentence of between one-and-a-half and three years.
The first hearing took place in March 2021. The court’s decision for the acquittal of the defendants came at the 15th hearing of the trial on Friday.
Friday’s hearing at the İstanbul 21st Penal Court of First Instance was attended by representatives from human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Turkey’s Human Rights Association (İHD) as well as opposition parties including the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party).
Reacting to Friday’s verdict on the Saturday Mothers, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for Europe, Dinushika Dissanayake, said that almost seven years after the Saturday Mothers’ 700th peaceful vigil was violently broken up by riot police, the people standing trial for participating in the vigil have finally been acquitted and their ordeal ended.
“A prosecution that should have never seen the light of day, dragged on for years,” she said.
Dissanayake called on Turkish authorities to draw the necessary conclusion from what she said “this long-awaited outcome: Saturday Mothers/People have the right to meet on Galatasaray Square every Saturday to demand justice for their disappeared loved ones,” while asking Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya to ensure that all ongoing restrictions on the square are lifted immediately and permanently.
“For more than one thousand Saturdays since 1995, the Saturday Mothers and their supporters have become a powerful symbol of the importance of peaceful protest. We must defend this right even in the face of crackdown, violence, detention and prosecutions,” she added.
The Saturday Mothers, who first gathered on May 27, 1995 in Galatasaray Square and have continued to meet there on Saturdays for a silent vigil, has staged the longest-running protest Turkey has ever witnessed.
The vigils, which saw the participation of larger numbers of people on landmark dates such as the 500th and 600th weeks, had been held peacefully without any restrictions by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government until the 700th week in 2018, when dozens of protestors were detained after police broke up the protest.
The “Saturday Mothers” vigil resumed in November 2023 without police intervention after Yerlikaya said during a parliamentary session that the government had “good intentions” and that a peaceful solution would be found, responding to questions by opposition lawmakers about the vigils.