After hearing defense statements by Deniz Nazlım, Yıldız Tar and Sibel Yükler, the court ruled to issue a writ to the Ankara Directorate of Security to request all the footage pertaining to the day of the incident

BÜŞRA TAŞKIRAN, ANKARA

The second hearing in the trial of journalists Deniz Nazlım, Yıldız Tar and Sibel Yükler, who were detained by force in Ankara while protesting the arrest of 16 Kurdish journalists, on the charge of “violating the Law no. 2911 on Meetings and Demonstrations” was held at the Ankara 71st Criminal Court of First Instance on 25 April 2024.

 

While lawyers representing the journalists Muhammet Ünsal and Gulan Çağın Kaleli Koçer were present at the hearing, Yıldız Tar and Deniz Nazlım did not attend. P24 monitored the hearing.

 

DİSK Basın-İş press labor union chairperson Turgut Dedeoğlu, journalist Hüseyin Aykol and journalist Eren Güven of the Pirha News Agency were heard as witnesses.

 

Following identification, the court heard Dedeoğlu.

 

Witness Dedeoğlu began his statement by emphasizing that the press statement had been organized by DİSK Basın-İş and said, “We organized the press statement. At the time I was the regional representative of DİSK Basın-İş. The location of the press statement was a place that was allowed by the Governor’s Office of Ankara. We informed them verbally. As holding a press statement is a constitutional right, we did not find it necessary to obtain written permission.”

 

 

Dedeoğlu: “The people on trial were not to deliver the press statement, they were participants”

 

Dedeoğlu said that police officers had told him that Uyghur Turks would be issuing a press statement at the same place that day and stated, “Police officers said ‘there could arise a conflict between the two groups. Therefore, we will not permit you to issue a press statement.’ Then, I told them that we were journalists, there is no possibility of conflict.”

 

Dedeoğlu continued, “I saw police officers batter Sibel Yükler. An officer about four times the size of Sibel Yükler was beating her and sat on her.”

 

Dedeoğlu also said that he had witnessed the journalists’ equipment being broken by the police on the day of the incident and went on, “I saw the police shouting ‘sweep them’ and pushing away our fellow journalists from inside Ulus Arcade and the square and detaining them.”

 

Dedeoğlu recounted that after they were prevented from reading out the press statement at Ulus Square, the statement was delivered from the DİSK Basın-İş premises and that they had felt the need to issue such a statement due to the intensity of detentions and arrests of journalists during that period.

 

Dedeoğlu underlined that the police had issued no warning before the journalists were detained and said, “The people on trial were not to deliver the press statement, they were participants.” Upon being asked by the judge whether the journalists had resisted the police in any way during detention, Dedeoğlu said that the journalists had undertaken no action against the police that could constitute a crime.

 

Aykol: “The way they were detained resembled the preparation for the strappado during the 80s”

 

Journalist Hüseyin Aykol, who had also intended to join the press statement, was also heard as witness. Aykol said that the way the journalists were detained resembled the preparation for the strappado in the 1980s.

 

Aykol recounted witnessing first Deniz Nazlım and then Sibel Yükler being forcefully detained by the police officers and then objecting to the detention by telling the officers “They are journalists” after Sibel Yükler called out to him, saying “They are taking us away."

 

Hüseyin Aykol also said that he had not heard or seen any warning being issued by police officers before the detention of the journalists.

 

Güven: “I heard their screams”

 

Journalist Eren Güven of the Pirha News Agency, who was also heard as witness, said that the arrested journalists for which the press statement was to be held were his former co-workers and therefore he had wanted to participate in the press statement.

 

Güven said, “Journalist Deniz Nazlım was next to me. I witnessed her being forcefully detained. My video camera was broken in the commotion. The police did not issue any warning beforehand. I heard journalists Yıldız Tar and Sibel Yükler's screams but did not see them being detained.”

 

Dedeoğlu: “There were many counter-terrorism officers that day”

 

Upon being asked by the prosecutor for the hearing why they had not applied to the governor’s office in writing and whether they had notified the authorities of their previous press statements, Dedeoğlu said, “As a labor union, we have carried out many press statements. We only provide verbal notice. We have never given written notice. We did not provide a written notice for this press statement either. We announce our press statements on social media.”

Dedeoğlu added that under normal circumstances, police officers from the labor unions office of the security directorate are assigned to press statements but on the day of the incident there were many officers from counter-terrorism department and remarked, “This is the real reason for this violence.”

Yükler: “Some of the footage we requested was not included in the case file”

Delivering her defense statement, Sibel Yükler said that the police had all the footage related to her detention and that no one else had footage of how they were detained because journalists had been forcibly removed from the area before the incident. Yükler said, “We filed a criminal complaint over the footage. We also requested its inclusion in the file for the present case. However, not all the footage was included to the case file.”

 

Following witnesses’ testimonies, lawyers delivered their statements.

 

Lawyer Muhammet Ünsal pointed out that a social media announcement for a press statement was sufficient to fulfill the notification obligation and said that the response from the Governor’s Office of Ankara to the interim order in the case file had shown that the square was not a “forbidden zone” for demonstrations. Ünsal said that elements of the impugned crime had not formed.

 

Ünsal added that the duty of the police is to ensure security and reminded the court that their request at the previous hearing for all the footage from the incident being submitted to the case file had not been met.

 

Lawyer Gulan Çağın Kaleli Koçer, who stated that the law did not require written applications for press statements, said that her clients had been tortured, had filed a criminal complaint and yet the investigating authority had not acted. Lawyer Koçer said that the present case against her clients had been filed three months after they filed a criminal complaint.

 

Both lawyers requested the acquittal of their clients at the end of their defense statements.

 

Announcing the court’s interim order, the judge ruled to issue a writ to the Ankara Directorate of Security to request all footage from the day of the incident.

 

The trial was adjourned until 19 September 2024.

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.