The international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague is being asked to investigate the Turkish government for alleged crimes against humanity in its pursuit and persecution of opponents around the world, The Guardian reports.
A panel of European legal experts has compiled a dossier of witness testimonies giving details of torture, state sponsored kidnapping, and wrongful imprisonment of about 200,000 people, said to have been carried out by the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The dossier is due to be delivered on Wednesday to the chief ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan.
“Turkish officials have committed crimes against humanity against hundreds of thousands of opponents of the Erdogan regime,” the submission says. “These crimes amount to a ‘widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population’, meeting the threshold for the ICC to launch proceedings against high ranking officials of the Erdogan regime.”
Turkey is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, but the Turkey Tribunal, an investigative body set up in 2020 by lawyers and human rights groups to collate evidence and witness testimonies, said that at least some of the alleged crimes were carried out on the territory of 45 ICC member states, as Turkey has pursued its perceived enemies well beyond its borders. Therefore, the tribunal argues, the ICC has jurisdiction.
