Cultural philanthropist Osman Kavala has been in prison since 2017. Today the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled, again, that Türkiye has violated his rights and said he must be released as soon as possible.
Businessman and activist Kavala founded Anadolu Kültür, a civil society organisation supporting cultural exchange and the arts. He was detained after being accused of links to the 2013 Gezi Park protests and then acquitted of those charges in 2020. New espionage allegations, drawn from the same investigation, kept him behind bars, and in April 2022 a court convicted him under Articles 309 and 312 of the Turkish Penal Code of attempting to overthrow the constitutional order, sentencing him to aggravated life imprisonment. No evidence was presented showing he had committed the crimes attributed to him.
This latest judgment follows the Court’s original finding of a violation on 10 December 2019. The Grand Chamber called Kavala’s situation as “entirely exceptional”. He has now been deprived of his liberty, without interruption, for more than eight and a half years, and although he pursued every domestic remedy available to him, none secured his release or corrected the violations the Court had identified.
Film producer Çiğdem Mater and documentary filmmaker Mine Özerden, both linked to Anadolu Kültür, were sentenced to 18 years in the same case. They have been jailed since April 2022, accused of aiding an attempt to overthrow the government.
None of them has been released. Kavala funded culture. Mater and Özerden made films. Three rulings, eight and a half years later, and Turkey continues to resist the pressure to reverse course. And it is artists and cultural workers who pay.
Freemuse continues to call for the immediate and unconditional release of Osman Kavala, Çiğdem Mater and Mine Özerden, and for an end to the prosecution of artists and cultural workers in violation of their rights to peaceful freedom of expression and assembly, as guaranteed under the Turkish Constitution and international human rights treaties to which Türkiye is a party.
