Court sessions lasting up to 15 hours in the mass corruption trial of jailed İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu could impair the defendants’ right to a fair trial and amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, Turkey’s main doctors group warned Monday.
The Turkish Medical Association (TTB) reached the conclusion in a scientific assessment that İmamoğlu’s lawyers filed with the İstanbul 33rd High Criminal Court.
TTB Central Council Secretary General Ali Karakoç signed the assessment and sent it to İmamoğlu lawyer Tora Pekin on August 27.
The schedule examined by the association began on August 17 and called for hearings on four days each week from 10 a.m. until after midnight.
Some sessions ended at 1:30 a.m., while lawyers had to travel at least 100 kilometers, or more than 60 miles, each day to reach the courthouse.
The hearings take place at the Marmara Prison complex in Silivri, about 70 kilometers west of central İstanbul.
Too little time for sleep, meals and rest can cause physical and mental fatigue to build over consecutive days, the association found.
Such strain may cause a rapid heartbeat, low blood pressure and low blood sugar.
It may also impair attention, memory, information processing, reasoning and decision making.
The resulting fatigue could hinder defendants from explaining their cases and protecting their rights, while limiting their lawyers’ ability to provide a defense.
Judges and prosecutors may also lose some of their ability to weigh evidence and make decisions after hours of work without enough rest, the assessment warned.
The TTB described any resulting harm as “human-caused trauma” and cited the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Classification of Diseases.
It said the conditions should be assessed under the category of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
The assessment also cited Article 148 of Turkey’s Code of Criminal Procedure, which bans wearing suspects down while taking their statements.
Whether the schedule meets the legal definition of that ban or of ill-treatment must be decided by the courts, the association added.
Pekin asked the judges to end sessions by 4 p.m. unless a defendant’s questioning was already in progress.
He told the panel that İmamoğlu’s lawyers would leave the courtroom if the request was denied.
The İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality case has 414 defendants, 51 of whom are jailed pending trial after the court released two defendants on September 3.
The trial got underway on March 9, almost a year after police detained İmamoğlu, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main political rival, in a sweep that sparked Turkey’s largest protests in more than a decade.
Prosecutors accuse İmamoğlu of leading a criminal network and seek his conviction on 142 counts, with a possible sentence of up to 2,430 years. İmamoğlu denies all accusations and calls the case an attempt to bar him from challenging Erdoğan. The government denies political interference and claims that Turkey’s courts are independent.
This article is republished from Turkish Minute.
