A female lawyer who came to the hearing of her client inside jail was brutally manhandled by the Turkish gendarmerie. Lawyer Lale Beşe, a former judge, attended the court hearing of one of her client in Kocaeli’s Kandıra Prison in which the gendarmeries attacked her, and shattered her shirt despite the fact that she tried to explain her situation in the first instance.
Speaking to Haber Ayyıldız online news portal, Lale Beşe told that the gendarmeries told her that she cannot enter the courtroom with telephone. Beşe stated that she needed to carry telephone with her on the reason of having a child with disability. “Let me either have phone in my purse or figure someway out,” Beşe told.
Later on the gendarmeries began to take a very aggressive attitude towards her. They torn up her shirt, and then they dragged her on the ground half-naked. Beşe said that she never felt degraded so in her life. In regards of gendarme violence, she pointed out that she worries if officers in charge are going to delete the security footage.
She also explained that she informed İstanbul Baro about the incident by noting that she is going to file a criminal complaint against the people who took role.
In addition to jailing thousands of judges and prosecutors, Turkey has also imprisoned hundreds of lawyers and made extremely difficult to join court hearings for them.
Ahmet Mandacı, a lawyer representing hunger striker educators Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça, was arrested. “We were told that lawyer Ahmet Mandacı was rounded up in the courthouse. Lawyer Mandacı was arrested after the prosecutor objected his brief release,” a series of tweets by the People’s Law Bureau (HHB) said on Saturday.
Gülmen and Özakça, who are on the 206th day of a hunger strike, have been kept against their will in the Sincan Prison hospital since July 29. The educators were on the 76th day of a hunger strike to protest their dismissal by a statutory decree when they were arrested on terror charges on May 23 in Ankara. The government earlier arrested another 14 lawyers of the educators.
Meanwhile, two Adana lawyers, identified as M.K. and M.A., were sentenced to 9 years in prison each on accusations of membership to a terrorist organization on Friday. M.K. and M.A. denied accusations and pleaded not guilty during the final hearing on Friday while the court in charge gave the two layers 9-year prison term.
Turkish government has arrested 551 lawyers while it has been carrying out criminal prosecution about 1390 lawyers since a controversial coup attempt on July 15, 2016.
