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Doctor appeals torture verdict

Shady 12-year-old case reveals grave flaws in legal system

By Jana Donovan
For The Prague Post
April 11th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
Dr. Yekta Uzunoglu has garnered the support of international activists and organizations — and even his alleged victim.
Talking to Yekta Uzunoglu, one’s sense of trust in the Czech legal system may start to waver.
His case of alleged torture, corruption and brutality strikes straight at the heart of the Czech justice system, and could have a major impact on the development of law and law enforcement for years to come.
Indeed, the Turkish-born Uzunoglu, an ethnic Kurdish medical doctor and businessman who has lived here off and on since the 1970s, has won legions of high-profile supporters including Amnesty International, the Czech Helsinki Committee and the Charter 77 Foundation. Hundreds of people, including former President Václav Havel, went on a symbolic 24-hour hunger strike in March to bring attention to his case. “It’s quite simply a scandal of justice,” says František Janouch, director of the Charter 77 Foundation.
Prosecution Timeline
  • Sept. 13, 1994 Uzunoglu is arrested in Prague and charged with crimes including abduction and torture
  • April 10, 1995 Charges of conspiracy to murder are withdrawn, others are dropped over the following years
  • March 12, 1997 After 31 months in prison, Uzunoglu is released
  • Oct. 5–6, 2006 Göksel Otan, Uzunoglu's alleged torture victim, retracts his accusation, saying Uzunoglu did not torture him
  • March 29, 2007 Prague 4 regional court finds him guilty on torture charges
  • Source: Amnesty International
Despite Uzunoglu’s international support, the Prague 4 regional court found him guilty March 29 of torture, one of several charges he has faced during the 12-plus years since his 1994 arrest. The guilty verdict sentences Uzunoglu to a two-year suspended sentence and five years’ probation — effectively meaning that, if he commits a crime in the next five years, he will serve the two-year prison sentence. Uzunoglu, who has said the charges were a plot by business rivals, is now appealing to the Prague City Court.
Uzunoglu says his troubles started after he was asked by a major Czech company to negotiate a contract to build an electrical plant in Turkey. The contract would have brought a lot of money to both Škoda and Uzunoglu.
But, just as the deal was nearly done, a former communist minister representing a company competing for the project warned him to immediately distance himself from the deal. “But I would not be a Kurd if I listened to him,” Uzunoglu recalls.
Days later, in September of 1994, he was sitting in prison.
He went on to spend the next two and a half years in pretrial imprisonment, charged with a range of offenses: torture, abduction, attempted murder, robbery, fraud and illegal possession of arms. Uzunoglu denies them all, and all the charges, except those of torture and abduction, were dropped due to lack of evidence shortly after he left prison in March 1997.
It was then that the soft-spoken doctor, who has translated into Kurdish the works of Karel Čapek, could have walked freely. Not only does he have a Turkish passport, but Germany, in a humanitarian gesture, granted him citizenship during his detention. But Uzunoglu, who also claims he was tortured while in prison, chose to stay and fight the remaining charges against him in hopes of clearing his name.
Those hopes were dashed March 29, disappointing many who have followed the twists and turns of his case.
“I was convinced that Uzunoglu would finally be acquitted,” says independent Senator Jaromír Štetina, a former war reporter who has championed Uzunoglu’s cause. “His case proves there’s something unhealthy in the police and the legal system of the Czech Republic.”
Shaky testimony
The main charge, and the one that has stuck to this day, is the torture of Göksel Otan, a Turk whom Czech media have reported as having worked during communism for the Czechoslovak secret police.
Last month’s court ruling shocked many observers in part because it was based on the sole testimony of Otan. Moreover, other key witnesses, who could have provided an alibi for Uzunoglu on the day he was alleged to have committed torture, were not summoned to the court.
“[The judge] didn’t summon 12 important witnesses, and it took many months before the main witness [Otan] appeared,” Janouch says.
Apart from the problem of having no other witnesses, Otan’s testimony is riddled with problems, according to many observers.
The latest hearings were considerably delayed because Otan had repeatedly failed to appear in court and the police had failed to secure his presence. Otan finally appeared for the first time in August last year. In subsequent hearings, Otan retracted his original testimony, repeatedly declaring that Uzunoglu did not torture him and could not have done so because he was not present during the act of torture. Otan reiterated the same statement last October.
All of which begs the question: How can a man be found guilty of a crime for which his alleged victim has absolved him in court?
“The biggest problem in our police and legal system are people,” says Jan Ruml, interior minister during Uzunoglu’s imprisonment. “Unfortunately, we did not manage to get rid of all the old structures in the first years after the revolution.”
Ruml adds that he believes Uzunoglu is innocent and acknowledges feeling guilty for not doing anything for him. But, the former dissident says, not even the interior minister can interfere in a criminal procedure.
Ghosts in the closet
Police vigorously deny Uzunoglu’s accusations of being tortured while in prison. “Torture is definitely not a police method,” says David Kubalák, spokesman for the Police Presidium.
But Libuše Šilhánová, head of the Czech Helsinki committee, sees a different reality. “When I found out who Uzunoglu’s police investigator was, I nearly fainted,” she says. “It was the man who investigated me under communism when I was imprisoned as a member of Charter 77.”
The moral of the story, according to rights activist John Bok, is that Czech society is still grappling with ghosts in its closet, nearly two decades after the fall of communism. Bok recently told Radio Prague that his organization, Šalamoun, is following dozens of similar cases in which people have been accused of crimes with little or no proof.
But Uzunoglu’s case is different, Bok says: “He wants to point out … what sort of people are harming this country and its justice system. So he’s doing this for this country — in this sense, it’s much more important for us than for him.”
If he loses, he says he’s prepared to take his case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.
“I’m not the only one who’s going through such a horrible injustice here,” he says. “I just hope it will finally help change some things.”

Jana Donovan can be reached at news@praguepost.com


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