TURKEY: A Turkish court yesterday agreed to retry former Kurdish lawmaker Ms Leyla Zana and three other former MPs in a case the European Union will be following closely.
Turkey's appeals court in June freed the four, jailed for 10 years for links to Kurdish separatists, amid pressure from the EU, which viewed them as political prisoners.
The appeals court overturned their convictions and ordered the criminal court to retry the four, including Ms Zana - a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee and winner of the European Parliament's Sakharov price for freedom of thought.
The criminal court, which replaced the security tribunals used to try political crimes abolished this year, upheld the court's decision for a retrial.
The retrial will be a test of whether Turkey has embraced the spirit of sweeping EU- inspired reforms it has recently adopted, defence lawyer Mr Yusuf Alatas said. "Although there is no legal possibility they will return to prison if they are convicted again, we will see that the perspective and approach remain the same," he said.
The court can either acquit Ms Zana, Mr Hatip Dicle, Mr Orhan Dogan and Mr Selim Sadak or hand down reduced sentences with time already served after an overhaul of the penal code this month, he said.
The new trial will hear the same charges the four faced in 1994 and in an earlier retrial that began in 2003, which upheld the original 15-year jail sentences.
The first retrial was opened after the European Court of Human Rights ruled they had not received a fair trial in 1994.
Ms Zana has called Turkey's reform drive "cosmetic". But her release was one reason the European Commission recommended this month that Turkey's human rights performance had im- proved enough to begin EU entry talks. The trial is set for Decem- ber 17th, the day EU leaders are to decide whether to give Muslim Turkey its long-awaited date to begin accession talks.
The former lawmakers were jailed as conflict raged between the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party and Turkish security forces. More than 30,000 people, mostly Kurds, died in the 1980s and 1990s.