The five Turkish teachers who were expelled from Moldova in September 2018 were sentenced in Turkey to jail terms of seven to 12 years. All the five cases are now pending at the appeals court in Turkey. After Moldova was convicted by the European Court of Human Rights, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe recently issued a decision concerning the execution of the judgment in the case of Ozdil and others by which the Moldovan authorities are requested to take individual and general measures. Relevant information was presented by representatives of the Legal Resources Center of Moldova and Promo-LEX Association.
In a news conference at IPN, Daniel Goinic, legal adviser at the Center, said that in June 2019, the ECHR passed its judgment in the case of Ozdil and others versus the Republic of Moldova. This case refers to the detaining and illegal expulsion of five Turkish teachers from Moldova to Turkey. The ECHR held the plaintiffs didn’t enjoy national and international human rights guarantees when they were detained and expelled. After the judgment is passed, the political organism of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe supervises the individual and general measures taken by the authorities of the defendant state to prevent and end the violation of human rights in the future.
Daniel Goinic said that among the general measures ordered by the Committee is the adjustment of the legislation on the stay of foreigners and the extradition procedure. The Committee urged the Security and Intelligence Service to have no tolerance for arbitrary detentions and extralegal transfers and called on the state to ensure an effective investigation into the incident of September 2018 as it does not see an effective mechanism for supervising and ensuring the collective actions of the employees of intelligence services in Moldova. The European institution doubts that the process that led to the violation of the rights of the plaintiffs involved only one person.
This February, the governmental agent remitted a plan of action that describes the situation of the five expelled citizens who were later convicted in Turkey.
Vadim Vieru, director of the Human Rights Program of Promo-LEX, spoke about the individual measures indicated by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. The Committee took note of the decision of the Chisinau Appeals Court, which ordered that the Migration and Asylum Bureau should offer the status of refugee to one of the applicants, even if this happened post-factum. The Committee invited the authorities to inquire about the result of the procedure in relation to another two applicants and to obtain from the Turkish authorities more detailed information about the state of the plaintiffs in jails in Turkey and information about the results of the appeals procedure.
Vadim Vieru, who is also the lawyer for the relative of one of the teachers, said the wife has limited communication and cannot obtain information about the detention conditions or other relevant information. The Government can insist on such information.
The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe also requested the Government of Moldova by September to present information about the developments in the criminal case in which the former SIS director was convicted and about the appeal filed by the wife of one of the Turkish teachers.
The conference forms part of the series of conferences held in the framework of IPN’s project “Exposing Injustice through Multimedia”. IPN Agency does not assume the right to decide if the organizers of news conferences are right in the cases about which they will speak as this is the exclusive prerogative of justice, but the exaggeratedly long examination period of these cases, which is much longer than the law allows, can be considered an act of evident unfairness and injustice. IPN News Agency does not bear responsibility for the public statements made in the public sphere by the organizers of news conferences.
