The German government has declined to comment on the impending deportation of Kurdish activist Mehmet Çakas to Turkey. In response to a written inquiry from the German Parliament (Bundestag) member Cansu Özdemir of The Left Party, the government stated that it does not comment on individual cases as a matter of principle.
“It is scandalous that the Interior Ministry has not taken any position on the case of Mehmet Çakas,” Özdemir said. Despite ongoing court proceedings against the deportation of the 45-year-old, the authorities in Lower Saxony want to create facts at the end of the month, she said.
“A federal interior minister who fails to comment on such legally dubious behavior is acting irresponsibly and is clearly not up to the job,” said Özdemir. She called for the planned deportation to be suspended until the court rulings have been handed down. “Mehmet Çakas needs a fair asylum procedure,” she underlined.
Çakas was extradited from Italy to Germany in 2022. In April 2024, the Higher Regional Court in Celle sentenced him to two years and ten months in prison for alleged membership of the now defunct Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The sentence would normally have been served in October, but was suspended early by the Celle Public Prosecutor’s Office pending deportation.
The Lower Saxony Immigration Office ordered his deportation for August 28. However, both the Celle Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Federal Office of Justice had decided in 2023 that extradition to Turkey was out of the question. The background to this was an extradition request from Ankara. At the time, the German authorities pointed to the threat of a severe life sentence in Turkey.
This decision by the Federal Office of Justice was not taken into account in the rejected asylum application in mid-May. In her inquiry to the Ministry of the Interior, Özdemir demanded clarification as to how the contradictory assessments between the competent authorities could have come about.
Source: ANF News
