The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe today ordered Turkey to release the opposition Osman Kavala until the end of November.
Otherwise, the Council of Europe threatened Turkey to start the sanctions process.
Kavala, 63, a populist and civil society figure in Turkey, was arrested in October 2017 on various charges related to the 2013 anti-government protests and the failed 2016 coup. He has been in custody for more than three years without being convicted. .
Kavala denies all charges but has not been released, despite Ankara’s conviction by the European Court of Human Rights in December 2019.
The fact that Kavala remains in prison “indicates the refusal of the (Turkish) authorities to obey this order of the Court”, the Committee of Ministers states.
This body, in which the foreign ministers of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe or their representatives participate, met from Tuesday until yesterday Thursday to examine whether the decisions of the ECtHR have been implemented.
As Turkey did not implement the 2019 decision, the Commission “expressed its willingness to formally announce to Turkey its intention to start the process” at its next meeting (November 30-December 2), since Kavala has not released by then.
This procedure, which requires a two-thirds majority of Member States (ie 32 out of 47) to be approved in order to ratify any sanctions, has only been used once in the past, against Azerbaijan, in 2017. In this case, Baku did not release an opposition leader, Ilgar Mammadov. Faced with the threat of sanctions, Mammadov was finally released in August 2018.
The Commission did not specify what sanctions it could impose on Turkey.
Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ
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