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Author: Zaman Australia

  • Australian ISIL terrorist Prakash will be free in 2 years thanks to lenient Turkish judges

    A panel of three judges who heard the case of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militant Neil Christopher Prakash in Turkey handed down a reduced sentence for the Australian recruiter and facilitator for ISIL, setting his release for 2021.

    Judges at Turkey’s Kilis High Criminal Court ruled for a six-year sentence for the US and UN-designated terrorist, also known as Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, deciding on a near minimum for membership in a terrorist organization, then increasing it to nine years before slashing it by one-sixth and settling on seven years, six months. The judges stated that a long sentence could have a negative impact on his future and used their discretion in reducing his sentence.

    The judges’ decision to reduce his sentence was based on Article 62 of the Turkish Penal Code, also known as Law No. 5237, which was passed by the legislature in 2004. The provision includes grounds for discretionary mitigation in sentencing, listed as “background, social relations, the behavior of the offender after the commission of the crime and during the trial, and the potential effects of the penalty on the future of the offender.”

    Twenty-seven-year-old Prakash faced between seven-and-a-half and 15 years. His lawyer Reşat Devran had been stating throughout the trial that he expected his client to get the minimum if a jail sentence were to be imposed, although he said he was trying to get an acquittal on all charges.

     

     

    What is more, Prakash was not sentenced for any terrorist act while he was with ISIL in Syria and Iraq, nor was he convicted for being a lead figure in the organization, which would have qualified him for a heavier sentence on other violations of the Turkish Penal Code. He pleaded guilty to the membership charges but denied involvement in any terrorism act during a hearing held on February 20, 2018. It appears this dangerous terrorist benefitted from the permissive political environment in Turkey, where the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been helping ISIL, al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups to topple the Bashar al-Assad regime.

    Given the probation rules in the Turkish criminal justice system, he is eligible for early release in two-and-a-half years, meaning that he will be a free man in 2021. This stands in sharp contrast to heavy sentences including life in prison handed down to Turkey’s leading journalists who were jailed by the Erdoğan government over their comments, tweets and op-eds. In the criminal justice system, most radical terrorists including al-Qaeda and ISIL militants have been let go, either with no charges or reduced sentences thanks to the current Islamist government in Turkey.

    Small wonder Prakash asked for his trial to be conducted in Turkey and did not want to be extradited to Australia to face charges. The Turkish court rejected the Australian government’s extradition request in July 2018. Prakash was believed to be a key figure in inspiring terrorist plots in Australia and has been linked by the FBI to a failed plot to attack the Statue of Liberty in New York.

    In his testimony to the court at a September 2018 hearing, Prakash admitted that he originally joined the jihadist Ahrar al-Sham, which was openly backed by Turkey for years, and said he later switched to ISIL. He crossed into Syria from Turkey’s border town of Reyhanlı in October 2013.

    He claimed he had never used a gun, went to Syria to educate himself on religious teachings and was involved with humanitarian work for three years in Syria. He also stated that he was not paid for his work and ran media operations for ISIL. Asked about his photos in army fatigues with guns that were on his phone, Prakash explained he was told that he needed such photos to be accepted into ISIL. He operated in Idlib, Raqqa and Mosul, cities that were under ISIL control at the time.

    He was detained by border guards near the village of İnanlı in the border province of Kilis while trying to cross into Turkey from Syria on October 24, 2016 with a fake identity. The area on the Syrian side across from Turkish village was controlled by ISIL at the time. He was formally arrested at his arraignment and sent to the Gaziantep H type Prison. Two women identified as Rumana Bibi and Fadxiya Ahmed were making the journey with Prakash when they were detained. Both women were released. During a hearing on December 20, 2018, Prakash testified in broken Turkish that he knew the husbands of the women, and the court tried to locate them to testify as witnesses after their release. Expressing regret in the courtroom, Prakash claimed he had defected from ISIL, repented for his sins and did not understand why he was put in pre-trial detention.

    In December 2018 the Australian government announced that Prakash had been stripped of his citizenship on terrorism charges and stated that he was a dual Australian-Fijian national. However Fiji rejected the claim he was a citizen. Prakash was born in Melbourne to a Fijian father and a Cambodian mother. At a February 20, 2019 hearing in Turkey the judges told him that his Australian citizenship had been revoked and asked whether he had any knowledge of that. Prakesh responded in Turkish and said he was aware of it.

  • Australia’s Senate condemns lawmaker over New Zealand massacre Muslim comments

    Australia’s Senate censured an independent right-wing lawmaker on Wednesday for his comments that New Zealand’s mosques shooting massacre which left 50 people dead was a result of letting “Muslim fanatics” migrate to the country.

    Senator Fraser Anning has been widely condemned for his comments made shortly after a lone gunman attacked two mosques in Christchurch on March 15.

    “There is no room for racism in Australia. Sadly, what Senator Anning said after the Christchurch massacre, however shocking isn’t out of character,” Australian Muslim Senator Mehreen Faruqi told the Senate.

    “Just a week before I joined this place, he gave a speech calling for a ban on people like me coming to this country.”

    Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist, has been charged with one murder following the attack and was remanded without a plea. He is due back in court on April 5, when police said he was likely to face more charges.

    Sitting for the first time since the attack, Australia’s upper house overwhelmingly passed a censure motion against Anning – the first such public rebuke of a lawmaker in four years. A censure motion has no direct legal consequences but acts as an expression of the Senate’s disapproval.

    Senator Anning denied he had blamed the victims, insisting the censure was an attack on his civil liberties.

    “This censure motion against me is a blatant attack on free speech,” Anning told Reuters via email.

    Leaders of the major parties in the Senate condemned Anning’s comments, with opposition Labour Senator Penny Wong rejecting his “free speech” defence.

    “There is a difference between freedom of speech and hate speech. The former is a feature of our democracy. The latter is an attack on democracy,” Wong said.

    “This motion makes it clear he doesn’t speak for us. He doesn’t speak for the Senate. He doesn’t speak for this nation. He doesn’t represent Australian values.”

    Anning’s comments gained international attention after footage of a teenager smashing an egg on the head of the right-wing senator was widely shared on social media. [nL3N21309L]

    (Reporting by Alison Bevege; Writing by Colin Packham; Editing by Michael Perry) Sydney (Reuters)

  • Wife of liver transplant patient calls on authorities not to return husband to prison

    Olcay Kara, the wife of teacher Engin Kara, who was arrested in February 2017 and received a liver transplant a few days ago, has called for a postponement of his sentence due to health concerns, the MedyaBold news website reported.

    “He may die if he is not treated in a hygienic and stress-free environment. They keep 44 people in a ward designed for 20. My husband shouldn’t go back to jail,” she said, invoking a law governing the execution of sentences for sick inmates.

    A teacher of 22 years, Kara was arrested in February 2017 based on an accusation by an informant. He was sentenced to six years, 10 months in prison for alleged links to the Gülen movement, which the Turkish government accuses of orchestrating a failed coup in 2016.

    After scars appeared on his body, he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and required a transplant.

    The operation was successfully performed, using parts of his son’s liver.

    Kara’s wife said four members of the gendarmerie are constantly on watch at the entrance to the intensive care unit, where her husband is being treated.

    “Prison conditions aren’t appropriate for people who have just undergone surgery,” she said, adding that there are cases where inmates who were returned to prison after receiving a liver transplant developed cancer or died.

    “We requested a postponement of one year. The doctors say the slightest complication may end up in death,” she said.

  • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be expelled ‘within hours or days’

    Julian Assange is to be expelled from Ecuador’s London embassy within hours or days, according to a “high level” source quoted by WikiLeaks.

    In a tweet sent on Thursday, WikiLeaks claims the Ecuadoarian state has an agreement with the UK for his arrest.Assange has been living inside the London-based embassy since 2012 seeking refuge after a British judge ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden for sexual assault allegations.

    Sweden dropped the case in 2017 but Mr Assange remains in the embassy following accusations of espionage.

    He fears being extradited to the US to face charges over the WikiLeaks website’s release of sensitive US government files.

    The US wants Assange after Wikileaks hacked documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

    In 2010, Wikileaks released footage from the Iraq war reportedly showing footage of soldiers shooting civilians. In the same year, the UK was on the verge of extraditing Assange.

    Back in 1995, Assange was let off with a fine and escaped prison for hacking attempts in Australia.

    He set up Wikileaks in 1996, protecting anonymous sources with highly encrypted devices.

    Ecuador last year posed new rules for Assange’s behaviour while in the embassy, which required him to pay his medical bills and clean up after his pet cat.

    He challenged the rules in local and international tribunals, arguing they violated his human rights. Both courts ruled against him.

    Assange has not stepped out once from the embassy, for fear of arrest by British police.

  • Europe calls on Turkey to prevent political interference in vote recount

    Judges in Turkey evaluating appeals after last Sunday’s local elections must be free to work without political interference, said the Council of Europe’s congress of local and regional authorities in a statement on Thursday.

    Turks headed to the polls on March 31 to elect their local governments. The unofficial results showed the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) facing a major blow after losing in four out of five major provinces in Turkey, including Istanbul and Ankara.

    The AKP has requested recounts of votes in Istanbul and Ankara, while the Supreme Election Board (YSK) rejected similar appeals by the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party in the eastern province of Muş and in several predominantly Kurdish districts.

    “We acknowledge the challenging or recounting of votes in the case of tight election results. Such challenges are rare and normally only involve a handful of votes in very few places,” the Council of Europe’s Bureau of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities said on Thursday during its 36th plenary session in Strasbourg.

    “When challenges are made relating to many thousands of votes in many places questions inevitably arise about the integrity of the entire election process,” it said.

    The bureau said it had decided to take the exceptional step of continuing its oversight of the Turkish local government elections while challenges are ongoing, and called on Turkish authorities to ensure that the YSK and its district level boards carry out their work in an open and transparent manner.

    “We expect their work to be fully in compliance with international norms and standards, free from any and all inappropriate political interference and consistent with the rule of law. Their work must be lawful, open and transparent and their adjudications fair reasonable and honest. The judges must be free to work without interference,” it said.

    A 22-member delegation from the Council of Europe monitored Turkey’s March 31 local elections with observer missions at 140 polling places and presented its preliminary conclusions on Monday at a press conference in Ankara, urging the Turkish government to encourage freedom of expression, unfettered media access for political candidates and a stronger electoral legal framework.

    The spokesperson of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hami Aksoy, said on Wednesday in a written statement that the congress’s election mission should refrain from commenting on Turkey’s political issues that are outside its mandate.

    The Bureau of the Congress said on Thursday that sovereignty of the people meant that the public could vote in a reasonable and fair political climate and see that their political and democratic choices and decisions were fully respected.

    “This means that, whenever the Congress observes an election, we are interested in far more than the organisation and mechanics of voting on the Election Day including the media landscape, the campaign and political environment and freedom of expression in general,” it said.

    The Party of European Socialists (PES) also urged the AKP on Thursday to accept the result of the local elections .

    PES President Sergei Stanishev said there was no reason to challenge the results in Istanbul, adding that 16 million people living in the province had made their voice and elected opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoğlu as the new mayor.

    “We call on the Turkish government to refrain from any political pressure on judges,” Stanishev  said. “The government must recognise the results the YSK has already announced, rather than looking for ways to distort the results, which are clear for the international community.”

  • Veggie burgers at risk of losing ‘burger’ status

    Vegan and vegetarian food is very much a rising trend across Europe but now, if the European Parliament’s Agricultural Committee has its way, the word veggie may have to disappear from some of the sector’s most popular products.

    The committee has decided that animal product names for plant-based foods are misleading for consumers.

    Critics suspect pressure from the meat lobby but Éric Andrieu, a member of the Committee, denied that was the case.

    “The meat lobby is not involved in this. It was a debate in the Parliament, and more than 80% (of the committee) approved the proposal. It’s about common sense for consumers. We need to use the word steak for an actual steak.”

    The European Parliament would have to approve the proposal before it could be adopted into legislation.

     

  • Belgium apologises for abduction of thousands of mixed-race children during colonial-era

    Belgium apologised on Thursday for the abduction of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during its colonial-era rule between 1959 and 1962 of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda.

    The apology was the first time Belgium has officially acknowledged responsibility for the forced removals.

    Belgium took away thousands of mixed-race children, known as “metis,” born to white settlers and black mothers in these Central African nations towards the end of its colonial rule under a policy of segregation, which took the children and put them in schools and orphanages in Belgium run by the Catholic Church.

    “In the name of the federal government, I present my apologies to the metis of the Belgian colonial era and their families for the injustices and the sufferings they have endured,” Prime Minister Charles Michel told Parliament as dozens of former abductees looked on.

    “I hope that this solemn moment will be an additional step toward an awareness and knowledge of this part of our national history.”

    The Catholic Church apologised for its role in the kidnappings in 2016 and in February a report by a UN Security Council panel urged the Belgian government to also issue an apology, for what it called “atrocities committed during colonization”.

    The report added: “The root causes of present-day human rights violations lie in the lack of recognition of the true scope of violence and injustice of colonization.”

    Belgium’s rule in Central Africa lasted from the 1800s to 1960 where King Leopold II exploited rubber and other resources, which led to slave labor that cost between 10 million and 15 million lives. euronews

  • Ruling AKP keeps putting up victory posters in İstanbul where it lost

    Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) continues to hang banners claiming victory in İstanbul, which it has lost to the opposition nominee for mayor, according to the unofficial results of Sunday’s local elections. the Artı Gerçek news website reported on Tuesday.

    “Thanks, İstanbul” read the posters, which were put up at several points in İstanbul after unofficial results declared the Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the new mayor of İstanbul.

    The posters were first sighted yesterday and were removed after a public outcry and İmamoğlu’s reaction.

    They were seen once again this morning in several districts. AKP circles had implicitly conceded defeat in İstanbul by declaring their intention to object to the results.

  • ‘It’s not flash being disabled’: PM launches $527 million disability royal commission

    Prime Minister Scott Morrison has officially launched a disability royal commission which will run for three years and will include commissioners who have lived experience of disability.

    An emotional Prime Minister Scott Morrison has officially launched the royal commission into the abuse of disabled Australians in one of his final acts before the election campaign.

    Mr Morrison detailed the establishment of the commission in Canberra on Friday morning before he is expected to call an election before the end of the weekend.

    More than $500 million was allocated in Tuesday night’s budget into the Brisbane-based inquiry which will run for three years.

    It will be led by former NSW Supreme Court judge Ronald Sackville, who will be assisted by five other commissioners, some of whom have lived experience of disability.

    The government voted in favour of setting up the royal commission only after a motion calling for the commission was put forward by Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John and passed with Labor’s support in February.

    The inquiry is set to examine the mistreatment in institutional settings, workplaces, schools, home and the community.

    “The royal commission will inquire into all forms of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation. It will cover all settings in which these abuses occur – all settings,” Mr Morrison told reporters on Friday morning.

    It’s the sixth royal commission in six years.

    Mr Morrison became emotional as he talked about his brother-in-law Gary, who has multiple sclerosis.

    “As my brother-in-law Gary also said to me, it is not flash being disabled but the good thing is that that’s the condition you live with in Australia and that you’re an Australian.

    “That has always meant a lot to me. They deserve our respect. This is so above politics I can’t tell you.

    “To all those Australians with a disability, their families, to Gary, this is for you.”

    Both major parties had asked if states and territories would be willing to share the cost, but have now committed to fully funding it.

    While previously allocating only $26 million to the commission, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said on Friday that Labor would match the spending commitment to ensure the inquiry goes ahead.

  • Half way into recount of İstanbul vote, opposition’s victory prevails

    According to polling station officials from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), after recounting ballots in 12 districts of İstanbul the difference between ruling party candidate Binali Yıldırım and opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu has increased by 22 votes in favor of the latter, the Diken news website reported on Thursday.

    On Monday Turkey’s Supreme Election Board (YSK) announced that İmamoğlu won İstanbul by a narrow margin.

    The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) objected to the results and requested a recount in certain districts.

    AKP Co-chair Ali İhsan Yavuz on Thursday reported that after the recounts Yıldırım’s vote had increased by 1,641 and that the ruling party would emerge as the winner in İstanbul; however, İmamoğlu stated that he was still ahead of Yıldırım by more than 19,000 votes after the reassessment.

    Meanwhile, AKP Secretary-General Fatih Şahin told reporters on Thursday that the party was also unhappy with the Ankara recount, which was seen as confirming the opposition’s victory, and would appeal for a second, wider, check of all the results, Reuters reported.turkishminute