Kurdish lawyer sentenced to 11.5 years in prison

Under the leadership of the dictatorial President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who likes to be dubbed “Sultan,” the human rights situation in the Kurdish regions of Turkey continues to deteriorate. More and more human rights activists who are working for justice are coming under pressure and are increasingly being targeted by the controlled judiciary.

A court in Urfa has sentenced a human rights lawyer to no less than eleven years and six months in prison. The alleged crime of Sevda Çelik Özbingöl, who until the fall of 2016 was the female head of the HDP provincial association, is that she “acted as a member of a terrorist organization” – meaning the PKK – and participated in unauthorized protests. The lawyer is alleged to belong to the “prison structure of the PKK” and serve as an “informant”. “There is no evidence in the indictment,” said Nazime Ferda Güllüoğlu, one of Özbingöl’s six defense lawyers from the Urfa Bar Association. The defendant herself said in court that the indictment did not contain any specific accusation against her.

The Urfa Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office is basing its case against Özbingöl, among others, on a supposed “witness” who previously stated: “I believe I remember that the defendant was part of the prison structures of the terrorist organization. As a member of this structure, she reportedly met with PKK prisoners in Siverek prison to exchange information. “However, the persons named by the witness were not detained in the said correctional facility at any time,” said defense lawyer Abdullah Öncel, who is also the chairman of the chamber in Urfa. Later, the witness is reported to have said anyway that he could not remember ever having met Özbingöl.

Motions by the defense to have the prosecution witness testify again in court were rejected, as were demands to present relevant evidence to substantiate that the protests and demonstrations criminalized by the prosecution were in fact banned. Among other things, this concerns actions by civil organizations against violence against women and a trip to Kobanê in Western Kurdistan/Northern Syria that was authorized by the Suruç district administration.

Sentence not yet final

The prison sentence against Sevda Çelik Özbingöl, consisting of six and a half years in prison for the common terror charges, one year and three months for propaganda, and three years and nine months for violations of Assembly Law Number 2911, is not yet final. The lawyers announced that they would appeal. Basically, the judiciary is only interested in eliminating “an unyielding advocate of human and women’s rights.” Özbingöl is one of the defenders of the survivors of the ISIS attack in Suruç, in which 33 mainly young people lost their lives in July and 104 others were injured, some seriously six years ago. She also defends Kurdish woman Emine Şenyaşar, whose husband and two sons were murdered by bodyguards of an AKP politician in Urfa in summer 2018.