TURKEY. EUROPEAN COURT SAID OCALAN TRIAL 'UNFAIR,' RECOMMENDS RETRIAL

the European Court of Human Rights upheld a ruling in favour of jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, saying that he had been unfairly tried by a Turkish court, and urged Ankara to retry him.
Ocalan had been sentenced to death in a high-profile trial in 1999, but his sentence was commuted to a life sentence, which he was serving in the prison island of Imrali.
In an 11-to-6 ruling, the European judges considered that the Turkish state security court judging Ocalan was neither independent nor impartial because of the presence of a military judge on the panel.
The Strasbourg-based court considered that Ocalan "had been convicted by a court which did not meet the Convention requirements of independence and impartiality."
Thus "a retrial or a reopening of the case, if requested, represented in principle an appropriate way of redressing the violation."
Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, deputy chairman of the Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) said Ankara would take the necessary steps to address the flaws found by the European court.
He stressed that the objections of the European court pertained only to procedural flaws and did not contest the essence of the verdict, which condemned Ocalan to death for treason and separatism.
A lawyer for Ocalan, Marc Muller, said he was satisfied with the ruling and would consult with his client on whether to ask for a retrial.
"He will probably agree. There should be a new trial," Muller told reporters. "If Turkey wants to join the European family it has to respect the minimum rules that apply to all human beings."
"The Grand Chamber found that the overall effect of those difficulties taken as a whole had so restricted the rights of the defence that the principle of a fair trial ... had been contravened," the court said.
His death sentence following an unfair trial also amounted to "inhuman treatment," the court ruled. Ocalan's sentence was commuted on October 3, 2002, after Turkey scrapped the death penalty in a bid to ease its entry into the European Union.