Jailed Turkish campaigner awaits verdict after marathon trial

A main Turkish rights defender expects to learn Monday if he can stroll free after more than four years in prison without conviction or whether he’s going to spend the rest of his days behind bars.

The marathon trial of Paris-born philanthropist Osman Kavala has gnawed on Turkey’s ties with Western allies given his arrest in October 2017.

The64-year-old  turned into then nice called a tender-spoken businessman who became the usage of a part of his wealth to promote subculture and tasks aimed toward reconciling Turkey and its arch-nemesis Armenia.

But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan portrayed him as a leftist agent of the Hungarian-born US billionaire George Soros who was accused of using foreign money to try and topple the state.

Monday’s closing hearing in the diplomatically-sensitive case — observed by Kavala in silence by video link from his high-security prison on Istanbul’s outskirt — featured closing statements from defence attorneys.

The three presiding judges drew protests from Kavala’s supporters in court at one stage for repeatedly checking their telephones during the lawyers’ closing statements.

Kavala’s team expects the judges to publish their verdict later Monday.

But the potentially brief deliberations bely a complex case that has featured an alternating set of charges against a man whom Erdogan has personally blamed for repeatedly trying to unseat him from power.

Kavala was first charged with funding a wave of 2013 protests that some analysts view as the genesis of Erdogan’s more authoritarian streak in the latter half of his 20-year rule.

That count did not stick.

A court acquitted and released him in February 2020 — only for the police to arrest him before he had a chance to return home to his wife.

Another court then accused him of being involved in a failed but bloody 2016 coup attempt that unleashed a years-long crackdown in which tens of thousands were either jailed or stripped of their government jobs.

Kavala now stands accused of both charges.

His treatment has prompted the Council of Europe to launch rare disciplinary proceedings that could ultimately see Turkey’s membership suspended in the continent’s main human rights group.

“The fact that I have spent four-and-a-half years of my life in prison is a loss that cannot be compensated,” Kavala told the court in a closing statement issued Friday.

“The only thing that would console me is the possibility that what I have gone through helps put an end to grave judicial mistakes.”

Kavala could be jailed for life without the possibility of parole if he is found guilty of spying and trying to overthrow the government.

Seven other defendants still in Turkey are also being tried in connection with 2013 protests that sprung up in defense of a small Istanbul park before morphing into a national movement.

Defendant Mucella Yapici — also facing the threat of life in jail without parole — told the court that the 2013 rallies were the “most democratic, most creative and peaceful collective movement in this country’s history”.

But the case’s importance to Turkey’s broader diplomatic standing has been slightly muted by Russia’s two-month war in Ukraine.

Erdogan has been leveraging his relatively good ties with both Moscow and Kyiv to try and mediate an end to the war.

His efforts have already visible a marked development in Ankara’s relations with Washington that could quickly see Turkey furnished with US military jets.

The hearing on Monday will be held in Istanbul at the same time as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres meets Erdogan in Ankara before touring Moscow and Kyiv later in the week.