As the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers again puts off taking any action that might push Turkey to comply with the ruling of their own European Court of Human Rights, we are left wondering if we can even hope for Abdullah Öcalan to be granted his Right to Hope – and what is the point of the Council of Europe?
We won’t repeat the long history of Öcalan’s struggle against the illegal sentence of life without the possibility of parole – you can read about it in our last post – but we have to record, with sadness and anger, but no longer surprise, that despite all the representations and campaigning made on Öcalan’s behalf, the Committee felt it enough to put off for a further year doing anything beyond ‘expressing deep concern’ and ‘urging’ Turkey to obey the law. This time they have asked the Secretariat to prepare a draft interim resolution that can be used if Turkey still fails to respond to the Court’s demands, but that could have been made ready a long time ago.
The same committee has postponed further discussion of the Selahattin Demirtaş case until December.
And so, the campaigns to raise the profile of these cases go on…