Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland in Lausanne. Photo: Creative Commons/Wikimedia.org
ZURICH,— A Swiss court blocked the extradition to Germany of an alleged regional leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), ruling that German authorities had not made enough of a case against the man whose group is not banned in Switzerland.
The PKK, which has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, is designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
The man, a Turkish citizen whose identity was not revealed in the Federal Criminal Court verdict released on Thursday, had fought extradition since his arrest at Zurich airport last November on an international warrant.
Because the PKK is not outlawed in Switzerland, the court examined whether he would have faced similar Swiss charges for his actions, which allegedly included spreading propaganda and recruiting fighters in 2014.
It found a lack of evidence that he supported a criminal organisation, the equivalent Swiss crime that would have justified sending him to Germany to face trial.
If he was recruiting fighters, the court said, it was likely that they were to fight Islamic State jihadists in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), the Kurdish areas of Syria, or Iraq rather than to attack Turkish targets.
It ordered the man released from custody and awarded him 2,000 Swiss francs ($2,000) in compensation.
The PKK, a Marxist group, took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan (Bakur, northern Kurdistan) for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population. More than 40,000 Turkish soldiers and Kurdish rebels, have been killed in the conflict.
A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974 and currently serving a life sentence in Turkey, has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.
The PKK is considered to be a terror group by Ankara, the United States and the European Union. In 2008 EU court ruling overturned a decision to place the Kurdish rebel group PKK and its political wing on the European Union’s terror list. The United States has designated the PKK a terrorist organization since 1997.
However, Russia, Switzerland, India, China and the United Nations do not list the PKK as a terrorist organization.
In January 2020, The Court of Cassation of Belgium ratified the lower court’s judgement and ruled that Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party PKK is not a terrorist organization.
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