It happened as the Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan had announced: The Turkish journalist Can Dündar pays a “big price” for the fact that in May 2015 the Cumhuriyet newspaper, of which he was editor-in-chief at the time, made secret arms deliveries by the Turkish secret service to Syrian rebels public Has.

Erdogan accused Dündar of an "agent" who divulged state secrets, and he warned him that he would not get away with it.

Rainer Hermann

Editor in politics.

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    The judgment that an Istanbul court handed down on Wednesday against Dündar, who has been in exile in Germany since 2016, is therefore not a surprise. He was sentenced in absentia to 18 years and nine months imprisonment for espionage and eight years and nine months in prison for supporting a terrorist organization, by which is meant the Gülen movement. That adds up to a prison sentence of 27 years and six months. The prosecutor had asked for 35 years.

    The verdict shows the capers that the Turkish judiciary is capable of.

    Because in 2016 Dündar was already sentenced once, namely to five years in prison for betrayal of secrets.

    At that time, however, he was acquitted of the charge of espionage.

    The case of Enis Berberoglu, from whom Dündar received the documents about the arms transport, also demonstrates how idiosyncratic Turkish judges can be.

    The MP for the opposition CHP was sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason.

    An appeals court reduced the sentence to five years, and the Constitutional Court demanded that the case be reopened.

    However, the first dish initially ignored both, and nothing changed for Berberoglu.

    Then the case was reopened in 2018, and Berberoglu was sentenced again to five years in prison.

    Unlike Berberoglu, Dündar lives in exile and freedom.

    The price for this is that an Istanbul court first declared him “fugitive” in October and then confiscated his property.

    With that he lost the result of forty years of work, said Dündar.

    But he also wrote: “We, the 82 million citizens of Turkey, are just about to lose our homeland in the dark.

    At the moment that is more important than any house. "

    If Dündar were in Turkey, he would be one of the prominent prisoners in Silivri, the prison west of Istanbul reserved for political prisoners.

    With Osman Kavala, who has been imprisoned in Silivri since October 2017, and Selahattin Demirtas, who has been in Edirne for a year longer, Dündar forms the trio of the most prominent political persecuted in Turkey.

    Kavala speaks of "mental torture"

    The judiciary has also dealt with the two in the past few days. The philanthropist and entrepreneur Kavala has been imprisoned without ever being found guilty. In February 2020 an Istanbul court acquitted him of the allegations of having organized and financed the Gezi protests in spring 2013. The judges responsible for this verdict have been investigated since then, and the public prosecutor's office immediately opened the next trial against Kavala.

    Now he is accused of being a mastermind behind the failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016. He is also said to have tried to "secure information for the purpose of political or military espionage that should be kept secret for reasons of security and the interests of the state". The case was tried for the first time in an Istanbul court on December 18. Kavala participated in the video broadcast and said the charges in the indictment were without any evidence. “My ongoing incarceration, based on these strange allegations so far from the truth, has turned into mental torture. I hope this will be the last such charge. "

    The European Court of Human Rights asked Turkey a year ago to release Kavala because his detention was based on political motives and there was no evidence to support the charges. However, Turkey ignored this judgment just as it ignored Demirtas'. The European Court of Human Rights ordered the immediate release of the former chairman of the pro-Kurdish party HDP on Tuesday. Because the judges had come to the conclusion that the reasons put forward by the authorities for the pre-trial detention should conceal political motives. They also asked Turkey to pay 60,400 euros for property and non-pecuniary damage.

    While Kavala and Demirtas remain in custody for political reasons, MHP chairman Devlet Bahceli, the nationalist coalition partner of Erdogan's AKP, had his friend Alaattin Cakici, the leading godfather of the Turkish underworld, released from prison in April.