In Turkey, the endless trial of researcher Pinar Selek

Pinar Selek, a Turkish sociologist and activist who took refuge in France, last January in Strasbourg. AFP PHOTO/FREDERICK FLORIN

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2 min

Based in France, sociologist and writer Pinar Selek has been on trial for 25 years in her native Turkey, for a crime she has always denied and that probably never even existed.

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Four times tried for terrorism and four times acquitted, Pinar Selek will be tried again from this Friday in Istanbul. But unlike dozens of friends, colleagues, figures from civil society and the political world who made the trip in solidarity, the writer and sociologist will not attend her trial. Targeted by an international arrest warrant, the one who now faces life imprisonment lives in France.

For 25 years, the researcher has been fighting against an accusation that was found to have been fabricated. At the origin of this Kafkaesque affair, the academic work of the sociologist, who was very interested in minorities, Armenian and Kurdish. It was this last subject that disturbed him and earned him his first arrest in July 1998.

She is then asked to provide the names of the people she has met. He is accused of being linked to fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Pinar Selek refuses to speak. We deprive her of sleep, we disconnect her arm. "There, they wanted to confiscate not only my research, but also my entire profession and my beliefs," she told RFI.

« Psychological torture »

«

When they put me in jail, I thought I wouldn't stay there long. But two months later, I learned that I was facing a new charge," she continues. The researcher is now involved in a deadly explosion at Istanbul's Spice Market. No one had asked her about it until then. "I learned it on television," she says.

This is the beginning of what she compares to "psychological torture": her lawyers must prove that it had nothing to do with the explosion, which experts attribute to a gas cylinder, recalls our correspondent in Istanbul, Anne Andlauer. The prosecution, for its part, maintains the thesis of an attack. But justice has no evidence. Pinar Selek was acquitted four times between 2006 and 2014.

Each time, the prosecutor's office appeals. And each time, the Court of Cassation annuls the acquittal – the last in June 2022.

Read also: Pinar Selek: "There is in Turkey, a policy of terror" five months before the elections

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