Turkey: Turkey came under intense pressure yesterday to retry its most prized prisoner - Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan - after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that his original trial had ignored his legitimate rights of defence.
In an eagerly-awaited ruling that angered Ankara and inflicted fresh damage on Turkey's international reputation, the Strasbourg court said Ocalan's 1999 conviction for leading a 16-year separatist insurgency against the Turkish state was unsafe and deeply flawed.
Yesterday's judgment, which Ankara has vowed to appeal, is a bitter pill for Turkey since it regards Ocalan, the founder of the now-outlawed Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK), as its enemy-in-chief and originally sentenced him to death, a sentence subsequently commuted to life.
The jailed leader was also awarded the equivalent of $106,000 in costs.
Although non-binding, the ruling is a setback for Ankara's long-cherished hopes of joining the European Union. EU officials are closely monitoring Turkey's human rights record in the run-up to membership talks, and the judgment comes just days after negotiations on Cyprus collapsed - talks which Brussels has stipulated Turkey must support if it is to join the EU.
Nor did the court pull any punches. The applicant, it said, "did not have a fair trial".
The Ankara state security court which convicted Ocalan of leading a revolt that claimed the lives of up to 37,000 people had not, it said, "been an independent and impartial tribunal", due to the presence of a military judge.
It added that Ocalan's recourse to a proper defence had also been ignored. He had been granted only late and restricted access to his lawyers, he had been interrogated for at least seven days without being brought before a judge (during which time he made several self-incriminating statements) and he had initially been denied full access to his case file. - (Guardian Service)