The court ruled that Yükler, Nazlım and Tar, who had difficulty in following the hearings due to their professional activities, be excused from the hearings

BÜŞRA TAŞKIRAN, ANKARA

The third hearing in the trial of journalists Deniz Nazlım, Yıldız Tar and Sibel Yükler on charges of “violating Law No. 2911 on Meetings and Demonstrations” was held at the Ankara 71st Criminal Court of First Instance on 19 September 2024.

Sibel Yükler and Yıldız Tar as well as their lawyers were present at the hearing, which was monitored by P24. Deniz Nazlım did not attend the hearing.

Upon the requests of the journalists and lawyers, the video footage requested by the court from the Ankara Security Directorate during the last hearing was submitted to the file. Journalists Yıldız Tar and Sibel Yükler and their lawyers made their defense against the expert report in which the video footage was analyzed.

Journalist Yükler emphasized that the expert's report includes footage of her being laid on the ground, but that the report does not show the exact moment: “The expert report does not fully reflect the violence we saw at the time of the incident.”

Journalist Tar, on the other hand, said, “I do not accept the points raised against me in the expert report. In the images photographed in the report, I am the person being held and pressed to the ground.”

Journalists' lawyer Gulan Çağın Kaleli said, “The expert report states that there are 12 video files, but only two videos were photographed in the report.” Kaleli reminded that they had filed a criminal complaint against the law enforcement officers who intervened the journalists at the time of the incident on the charge of ill-treatment, but the prosecutor's office decided not to prosecute, and said that they took the decision of non-prosecution to the Constitutional Court.

Kaleli said that the police camera recording the moments when journalists were taken into custody at the time of the incident was directed in a different direction with the instruction of another police officer to “shoot those people there.” “This report proves the treatment my clients were subjected to and shows that the crime scene report prepared by the police and the indictment do not reflect the truth,” Kaleli said.

Kaleli stated that his clients had difficulty in following the hearings due to their professional work and requested that they be excused from the hearings.

The prosecutor said that he had nothing to say about the expert report and requested time to present their final opinion on the case.

The court decided to exclude Sibel Yükler, Yıldız Tar and Deniz Nazlım from the hearings and adjourned the trial until 7 January 2025.

Background of the case

Journalists Sibel Yükler, Deniz Nazlım and Yıldız Tar were detained after being assaulted and handcuffed behind their backs as they tried to join a press statement concerning 16 journalists who had been imprisoned pending trial in Diyarbakır, held upon the call of the DİSK Basın-İş labor union, in Ankara on 5 July 2022. Journalists who started gathering at the Ulus Ataturk Monument Square, where the press statement would take place, were first told to leave the square by the police as they “would not be allowed to make a press statement in the square.”

Sibel Yükler, Deniz Nazlım and Yıldız Tar, who were in a nearby area as they headed for the square, were told by the police to leave the area. The three journalists were assaulted and detained before they could leave the area. The journalists were released the same day, after giving their statements.

The incident report filed by the police and signed by 23 officers claimed that the journalists had “adopted a style of action and activity that is completely devoid of goodwill and fully focused on confronting security forces and deriving so-called victimization from it. This was clear from the attitude they displayed, and it was reflected in their body language”

The journalists filed a complaint against the police officers who assaulted them on allegations of “torture,” “insult,” “failing to report a crime,” “depriving a person of their liberty” and “causing bodily injury through surpassing the limit on the authority to use force” and accompanied by a Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TİHV) report that documented the assault they had suffered.

However, the prosecutor’s office decided not to prosecute the law enforcement officials, stating: “The police has exercised their authority in its basic form to neutralize the complainants who had been resisting the police and that there is no evidence presenting adequate suspicion to file a criminal case on law enforcement officials surpassing the limit to the authority to use force to commit the crimes of willful injury and torture or that they had been in abuse of duty.”

Upon the dismissal of their complaint, the journalists filed individual applications with the Constitutional Court on the grounds that the ban on torture, the freedom of expression and the freedom of association, as well as the ban on discrimination had been violated during their detention -- the last as another demonstration being held at the same time was given as the grounds for preventing the press statement in question.

In June 2023, about a year after the incident, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office filed an indictment against Nazlım, Yükler and Tar on the charge of “violating the Law 2911 on Meetings and Demonstrations.” However, the indictment did not include the camera footage of the moment when the journalists were assaulted and detained.

The indictment was accepted by the Ankara 71st Criminal Court of First Instance.