OSCE watchdog slams Ukraine for extraditing blogger to Turkey

KIEV, Ukraine – The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) media watchdog on Thursday, July 19, criticised the Ukrainian authorities for extraditing to Turkey a blogger accused of having links to the movement Ankara blames for a 2016 failed coup.

Ukrainian authorities confirmed that journalist and blogger Yusuf Inan had been handed to the Turkish authorities after Kiev received a request to extradite him last October.

Inan, an editor of an online news outlet and former editor of the Yerel Gündem newspaper and its website was detained by authorities in southern Ukraine earlier this month.

“Journalists should not be prosecuted for expressing their opinions and it is of concern that a critical journalist was extradited to Turkey,” said the OSCE representative on freedom of the media, Harlem Desir.

“I ask the Ukrainian authorities to clarify whether his freedom of expression and right to appeal were taken into consideration,” Desir said.

A spokesman for Ukrainian prosecutors insisted that “everything had been done in accordance with the national legislation.”

“In July, the request was granted and he was handed over to the Turkish authorities,” spokesman Andriy Lysenko told AFP.

The Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Sunday that Inan was expelled from Ukraine as part of an operation by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) against a “terrorist group”.

Earlier this week local police spokeswoman Olena Berezhna told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) Inan was arrested in the southern city of Mykolaiv by the Ukrainian security service, who removed him to an undisclosed location.

Inan is married to a Ukrainian woman and had a residence permit, Berezhna said.

He was the second Turkish national to be sent back to Turkey from Ukraine within days after the MIT flew suspect Salih Zeki Yigit home in an apparently similar operation.

The detentions were the latest covert overseas swoops against suspected members of the group of US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of orchestrating the coup aimed at toppling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkey has over the past year carried out multiple overseas operations to seize Gulen suspects in countries ranging from Kosovo to Gabon. – Rappler.com