European Court of Human Rights calls for immediate release of Turkish philanthropist
Europe’s top rights court yesterday urged Turkey to release businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala, who has spent more than two years in detention, and rubbished the charges against him.
Mr Kavala, who funded civil society projects across the country and notably pushed for reconciliation between Turkey and its neighbour Armenia, was arrested in 2017 on charges of seeking to overthrow the government.
His supporters denounced the charges as politically motivated. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has personally attacked Mr Kavala, calling him US financier George Soros’s agent in Turkey. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found that Turkey was unable to demonstrate that Mr Kavala’s “initial and continued pretrial detention had been justified by reasonable suspicions based on an objective assessment of the acts attributed to him”.
Turkey must now “take every measure to put an end to the applicant’s detention and to secure his immediate release”, the court said. Mr Kavala, who went on trial in June, has been charged with attempting to overthrow the government and the constitution through involvement in anti-Erdogan protests in 2013 and the failed coup in 2016.
He denies the accusations. The ECHR said that his detention was “based not only on acts that could not be reasonably considered as behaviour criminalised under domestic law” but also on acts whose exercise was guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. “In the absence of facts, information or evidence showing that Mr Kavala had been involved in criminal activity, he could not reasonably be suspected of having attempted to overthrow the government by force or violence,” it said.
The court also found that the breaches in the case “pursued an ulterior purpose ... namely that of reducing Mr Kavala, and with him all human-rights defenders, to silence”.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International urged Turkey to “release Osman Kavala immediately”.
Their statement criticised the indictment against Mr Kavala as “largely incoherent, packed with wild conspiracy theories.”