Country of origin information report Turkey March 2007

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Fair trial
10.27 The USSD 2005 report stated that:
“There is no jury system; a judge or a panel of judges decides all cases. Trials are public. The law requires bar associations to provide free counsel to indigents who request it from the court and bar associations across the country did so in practice. The law provides for the right to a speedy trial; however, at times trials lasted for years. Proceedings against security officials often were delayed because officers did not submit statements promptly or attend trials. In some cases, such delays extended beyond the statute of limitations, causing the trial to end without a verdict. The law prohibits the use of evidence obtained by torture in court; however, prosecutors sometimes failed to pursue torture allegations, and exclusion of evidence occurred only after a separate case on the legality of the evidence was resolved. However, in practice a trial based on a confession allegedly coerced under torture could proceed, and even conclude, before the court had examined the merits of the torture allegations.” [5b] (section 1)
10.28 The USSD 2005 report continued:
“In June [2005] the High Court of Appeals overturned a murder conviction reached by a court in Sinop Province on the grounds that police interrogated the defendant without granting him access to an attorney and there was evidence that the suspect had been tortured. In May the ECHR Grand Chamber ruled that imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan did not receive a fair trial during the proceedings that led to his 1999 conviction. The ruling upheld a 2003 decision by a lower ECHR body.” [5b] (section 1)
10.29 On 8 November 2004 the BBC reported that a Dutch court had blocked the extradition to Turkey of a Kurdish woman said to be a militant leader. “Nuriye Kesbir, alleged to belong to the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), is accused of organising attacks on military targets in the 1990s. The Dutch justice ministry approved her handover in September [2004] after the Supreme Court ruled she could be extradited. But a court in The Hague has said the Netherlands could not be sure she would receive a fair trial in Turkey.” [66o]
10.30 The Amnesty International (AI) annual Turkey report 2006 however noted that:
“The continuing inequality between prosecution and defence and the influence of the executive on the appointment of judges and prosecutors prevented the full independence of the judiciary. While from 1 June [2005] detainees enjoyed the right to legal counsel and statements made in the absence of lawyers were not admissible as evidence in court, few prosecutors in the new Heavy Penal Courts (which replaced the State Security Courts in 2004) attempted to review ongoing cases where statements were originally made without the presence of legal counsel and where defendants alleged that their testimony had been extracted under torture. Little effort was made to collect evidence in favour of the defendant and most demands of the defence to have witnesses testify were not met.” [12d]
10.31 The EC 2006 report however noted that:
“As regards the right to an effective remedy and to a fair trial, the average criminal trial period increased from 210 days in 2004 to 234 days in 2005, and so did the average duration of civil proceedings, from 177 days in 2004 to 184 days in 2005. The pending cases before the criminal courts remained stable: 1 050 754 criminal cases were carried over from 2004 to 2005, while 1 050 250 criminal cases were carried over from 2005 to 2006. The pending cases before the civil courts slightly increased: 757 560 cases were carried over from 2005 to 2006, compared to 717 960 cases carried over from 2004 to 2005.” [71a] (p61)