Turkey’s Human Rights Association (İHD) on Friday called for the release of six of its members who have spent more than two months in pretrial detention after being taken into custody before a NATO summit in Ankara.
The six are Tuğba Kahraman, Hale Nur Çetin, Mert Ahmet Aldemir, Şevin Özden, Emirhan Gedik and Zehra Camcı.
Kahraman works for the İHD and sits on its Ankara branch board, while the other five serve on the branch’s youth commission.
They face charges of membership in an armed organization.
The indictments cite peaceful meetings and demonstrations they attended but offer no concrete evidence of a crime, İHD said.
Prosecutors claimed the activists could carry out attacks meant to associate Turkey with terrorism, an assessment based on speculation rather than evidence, the İHD argued.
The cases and arrests are intended to intimidate rights defenders, İHD Secretary-General Osman İşçi said.
“Defending human rights is neither a crime nor grounds for prosecution,” he added.
The association also called for an investigation into allegations of torture and ill-treatment during the detentions.
Kahraman, Çetin, Aldemir and Özden are due to appear before the Ankara 4th High Criminal Court on September 29, while Gedik and Camcı will appear before the Ankara 2nd High Criminal Court on October 2.
The six were among 14 İHD members jailed pending trial after a June 23 operation in which security forces detained 225 people and courts sent 178 to pretrial detention.
The Ankara Governor’s Office also imposed a 13-day ban on protests for the July 7 and 8 summit, which Amnesty International called an unjustified attack on freedom of assembly and expression.
This article is republished from Turkish Minute.
