Former Kurdish MP detained in Italy

international | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Tuesday July 27, 2010 00:28 by KSI - Kurdistan Solidarity Ireland

Nizamettin Toguc to Fight Extradition

Kurdish spokesman's lawyer condemns arrest as political in nature.

Mr Nizamettin Toguç, a renowned and respected advocate for Kurdish rights, is fighting extradition to Turkey.

The former member of parliament was on holiday with family when he was arrested last week by the Italian police acting on a request by Turkey. He remains in detention while the Court of Appeal in Venice decides whether to release him pending extradition hearings. His lawyers have condemned the accusations against Mr Toguç as political in nature, adding that Turkey has yet to produce the complete dossier on which it is formulating its accusation.

Mr Toguç is a senior member of the Brussels-based Kurdistan National Congress (KNK) and the president of KON-Kurd, the union of Kurdish organisations in Europe. He has been a tireless spokesperson for Kurdish rights since his exile from Turkey.

Mr Toguç served in the Turkish parliament as a member of the pro-Kurdish Democracy Party (DEP), the third in a long line of pro-Kurdish political parties that were banned by the Turkish state since 1990. As part of a delegation to the Kurdish city of Batman in September 1993 to investigate numerous disappearances and political murders of Kurds by the so-called “unknown perpetrators” he was shot and injured. Two parliamentary colleagues were murdered in the attack, which has been blamed on state-sponsored terror groups. The following year, and within a year of the party’s foundation, the DEP was dissolved by a decision of the Constitutional Court in Turkey. Five of Mr Toguç’s colleagues, including Leyla Zana, had already been taken into custody. On the day of the Court’s decision in June 1994 Mr Toguç and a number of other Kurdish parliamentarians fled to Brussels. The European Court of Human Rights later ruled that Turkey violated the right to free elections the case of Nizamettin Toguç and his colleagues. http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?item=1&porta...oc-en

The timing of this arrest indicates a continuation of operations against Kurdish organisations and individuals in Europe that have been intensified at Turkey’s request in recent times. It follows the harassment and detention of numerous Kurdish community activists in Italy, France and Germany earlier this year, the detention of another senior KNK member and former Kurdish parliamentarian Mr Remzi Kartel in Spain last year and intense attacks by Belgian police against Kurdish satellite station ROJ TV in March.

Turkey’s Kurds continue to struggle for basic civil rights within the country. The Constitutional Court in Turkey dissolved the pro-Kurdish DTP (Peace and Democracy Party) in December 2009.