Four years have passed since the illegal arrest and expulsions of seven Turkish teachers who were later sentenced in Turkey to jail terms of 7 to 12 years. According to Promo-LEX, their cases are pending in Turkish appeals courts. As to the case started against the former head of the Security and Intelligence Service, this was fully declassified and the Chisinau Appeals Court is to pronounce on the appeal filed by Galina Tufekci, the wife of Feridun Tufekci, one of the expelled teachers who is now held in jail in Turkey, IPN reports.
In June 2019, the European Court of Human Rights passed its judgment in the case of Ozdil and others versus the Republic of Moldova. The Court held that the applicants didn’t enjoy national and international guarantees cornering the observance of human rights when they were arrested and extradited. Later, the ECHR passed its judgment in the case of Huseyin Bayraktar and Sertif Ayri versus the Republic of Moldova. The decision refers to another two expelled Turkish teachers.
After Moldova was convicted by the ECHR, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted four decisions on the execution of the decision in the case of Ozdil and others by which the Moldovan authorities are requested to take a number of individual and general measures. Representatives of the Legal Resources Center of Moldova and of Promo-LEX Association furnished the Committee of Ministers with several communications on the issue.
According to them, the Committee of Ministers attentively follows the execution of the decision in the case of Ozdil and others versus the Republic of Moldova. The next meeting is set to take place this December. The two associations reiterate the requests addressed to the Government – to implement the general and individual measures decided in the case of Ozdil and others versus the Republic of Moldova.
The Legal Resources Center and Promo-LEX ask the Prosecutor’s Office to swiftly determine the role of all the persons involved in the expulsion of the Turkish teachers. They call on the authorities to make sustained efforts to discover the truth in this case and to further obtain detailed information from the Turkish authorities about the current situation of the applicants in Turkey, including about the result of the examination of appeals, the visits by their families and the possibility of applying the Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons.
The seven foreign citizens – teachers and managers of the Orizont network of lyceums – were declared undesirable and expelled on September 6, 2018. The expelled citizens were convicted in Turkey. On June 11, 2019, the ECHR ascertained that the Republic of Moldova violated the rights of the seven Turkish citizens and obliged the state to pay by €25,000 to five Turkish citizens. The former SIS director Vasile Botnari was given a suspended sentence and was fined 88,000 lei.
