His supporters protest over the verdict in the Hrant Dink murder trial
THEY never expected real justice. But when an Istanbul court gave its verdict this week at the end of a controversial trial for the 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, an Armenian newspaper editor, his family and lawyers were still shocked. The judge acquitted all 19 defendants on charges of belonging to an “armed terrorist organisation”. Just one received a life sentence for conspiring to murder Mr Dink, who was gunned down in broad daylight outside the offices of AGOS, an Armenian weekly. Another suspect who had worked as an informant for the intelligence services was cleared, only to be sentenced instead to over ten years in jail for the 2004 bombing of a McDonald’s restaurant in Trabzon.
Fethiye Cetin, a lawyer and close family friend, described the trial as a “comedy from start to finish.” “But they reserved the biggest joke for last,” she added, as she stood outside the courthouse alongside Mr Dink’s stony-faced widow, Rakel.
Mr Dink, who deconstructed myths around the 1915 massacres of some 1.5m Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, ran afoul of the authorities when he called the episode genocide. He was slapped with a docket of court cases accusing him of “insulting the Turkish identity”. Another crime was to have exposed the Armenian roots of Ataturk’s adopted daughter and Turkey’s first female pilot, Sabiha Gokcen. Mr Dink wrote several prescient columns predicting his own tragic end after the authorities had warned him to keep in line.
The murder trial was seen as a test of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party’s commitment to the rule of law. For Turkey’s 60,000 ethnic Armenians, justice for Mr Dink might have salved the wounds of the past. “This verdict sends a clear message that Armenians are fair game,” said an Armenian businessman. Turkey’s prime minister noted that the outcome had “disturbed the public’s conscience” and said the appeals process was not yet exhausted.
Even Turkey’s allies worry about its legal system. In a report citing Mr Dink’s case, Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s human-rights commissioner, rebhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifuked Turkish judges and prosecutors for “giving precedence to the protection of the state over the protection of human rights.” He criticised lengthy pre-trial detention periods of up to ten years. A former chief of staff, Ilker Basbug, recently joined several other generals in pre-trial detention.
Sadullah Ergin, the justice minister, has announced reforms to reduce sentences for supposed terror crimes—such as praising the imprisoned Kurdish rebel chief, Abdullah Ocalan—and to raise the bar for evidence to detain suspects. These are welcome, if modest, steps. But they are too late for the scores of journalists, hundreds of students and thousands of Kurdish politicians and protesters still behind bars.
Πηγή: The Economist