Incarcerated Turkish patron Osman Kavala received the Vaclav Havel Prize from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Monday October 9 in Strasbourg. Awarded every year for ten years, the prize rewards “exceptional actions” of people committed to defending human rights in Europe and beyond. The ex-businessman is an emblematic personality of civil society. The black beast of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, he was arrested in 2017 and accused, against all likelihood, of having financed the 2016 coup and even the Gezi revolt, in the heart of Istanbul, during the spring of 2013.
This figure of the Istanbul intelligentsia is the second Turkish personality to receive the distinction. In 2017, the prize was awarded to judge Murat Arslan, former rapporteur of the Turkish Constitutional Court, imprisoned for “membership of a terrorist organization” by an Ankara court the previous year.
Like his predecessor, Osman Kavala was unable to travel to the Alsatian capital. Like him, however, he was able to write a letter of thanks which was read to parliamentarians from 47 countries present in the hemicycle, including Turkey, a member of the Council of Europe since 1950. It was his wife Ayse Bugra, sociologist and professor of political economy in Istanbul, present in Strasbourg, who carried her voice.
Detained since 1er November 2017, the philanthropist, now aged 66, was sentenced in 2022, after four and a half years of pre-trial detention, to “aggravated life sentence”in solitary confinement and with a safety period of “perpetual”. A sentence which had been introduced into the legal arsenal to replace the death penalty abolished in 2004.
This decisive verdict was pronounced after less than an hour of deliberation. Seven other defendants, the architect Mücella Yapici, the documentarian Cigdem Mater, the civil rights activist Ali Hakan Altinay, the lawyer Can Atalay, the director Mine Özerden, the academic Tayfun Kahraman and the founder of numerous NGOs Yigit Ali Ekmekçi had were sentenced to eighteen years in prison each for complicity on the same charge: attempting to “overthrow the government by force” by having fomented the Gezi Park protests.
“Judicial assassination”
The movement was the first major outburst of protest against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then prime minister. Peaceful and spontaneous, carried especially by the youth, it ended in violent repression, at the cost of seven deaths and more than 8,000 injured. At the time, Osman Kavala, known for devoting his fortune to his charitable activities and to promoting the multicultural heritage in Turkey – Kurdish, Armenian and Syriac – tried to play mediator between the demonstrators and the authorities. It’s bad for him. He becomes the main target of the authorities. The Turkish number one will never make a secret of his desire to punish the patron.
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