Capacity Building Association published their report, ” Helin Hasret Şen- Violation of Right to Life Case Monitoring Report” with the support of Etkiniz EU Programme.

Below you can read the executive summary of the report, originally published in Turkish:

This report was prepared by Kapasite Geliştirme Derneği (Capacity Building Association) and Cezasızlıkla Mücadele Güçbirliği Ağı (Coalition Network in Struggle against Impunity).

The aim of the monitoring work is to prevent violations of right to life from going unpunished by developing an effective case monitoring procedure by monitoring and reporting on a sample case. In this context, the court case concerning police officer Abdullah E. who was tried on the charge of killing 12-year-old Helin Hasret Şen in the Sur district of Diyarbakır, was monitored. The report consists of two main sections. The first section, “In the Background” provides information regarding the occurrence of the incident and the subsequent judicial and administrative processes. Within this framework, the report cited two court hearings concerning the incident.

The second section, the “Court Hearing Observation Report”, provides information regarding the monitoring of the court hearing held at the 1st High Criminal Court of Diyarbakır on March 3rd 2020. Observations on the hearing are presented in the report under the subheadings “Pre- Hearing”, “Attendance at the Hearing”, “Course of the Hearing”, “Requests and Statements of the Attorneys Present” and “Interim Decisions”. The report states that the panel of judges rejected the requests of the attorneys who sought the right to intervene in the hearings and that the majority of the attorneys presented special powers of attorney or certificates of authorisation to follow the case. The defence statement made by the defendant police officer is included in detail in the report and the conflicting statements are underlined. In addition, the report includes a statement by a witness police officer, who stated, contrary to the testimony of the defendant, that there were no armed conflicts in the area that day.

The attorneys stated that documents related to basic evidence had still not been included in the file despite the time that had elapsed, and argued that this situation was delaying the course of justice by prolonging the hearings. The report emphasises that the failure to take actions which should have been completed at the investigation stage brings to mind the practice of impunity in trials, where perpetrators or defendants are law enforcement officers. The report includes statements by attorneys who assert that the investigation was not effectively carried out, that crime scene investigation teams had not properly collected/preserved the related evidence, that the necessary criminal examination of the weapons and bullets had not been carried out, and that the plaintiff and their attorneys had been deprived of the right to pose questions directly to a witness and to conduct cross-examination. The report also noted that the attorneys and audience in the Helin Hasret şen trial were not allowed to return to the courtroom after the recess, and that they were only informed about the panel of judges’ ruling through the minutes of the hearing which they received later. The report provides information on the interim decisions and states that the next hearing was to take place on June 4th 2020 at 11 a.m.

Please click below to view the original version of the report (Turkish):

http://mersinyedirenk.org/images/2019-akdeniz-lgbti-yonelik-hak-ihlalleri-raporu.pdf