UK: Kani Yilmaz extradited
01 July 1997
In mid-August, Kurdish spokesman Kani Yilmaz was finally extradited to Germany to face charges of organising attacks on Turkish businesses and properties, after home secretary Jack Straw ignored campaigners' pleas and upheld the court order for his extradition. Yilmaz had spent almost three years in detention in Belmarsh prison. The decision, following the House of Lords' rejection of his petition against the extradition, was a slap in the face to supporters who believed that Straw would carry his opposition convictions into government; Straw was one of several Labour MPs who protested strongly when Yilmaz was arrested and detained for deportation on "national security" grounds on his way to a meeting at Westminster in October 1994. The arrest caused embarrassment to the Tory government because Yilmaz had been allowed into the country freely days beforehand; the German government's action in seeking his extradition was widely seen as too convenient, particularly since Yilmaz, a refugee from Turkey, had spent much time in Germany, where he had stayed quite openly, and there was never any attempt to charge him with criminal offences.
In a letter to Yilmaz' solicitors, the head of the extradition section of the Home Office's Organised and International Crime Directorate, Clare Checksfield, defended the original decision to detain Yilmaz who, she claimed, had been allowed to enter the UK "in error" after the Home Secretary had decided that he should be excluded on national security grounds. The letter defended the German authorities' failure to charge Yilmaz while he was in Germany on the ground that evidence linking him to the offences only became available in 1994. It adds that the German authorities aim to move quickly to trial once Yilmaz is back in Germany and have agreed to set off the time spent in Belmarsh prison awaiting extradition "against any prison term he may receive in Germany".
In a statement of 6 August, Kani Yilmaz thanks everyone involved in the campaign for him and says that western governments must recognise the PKK as the legitimate representative of the Kurdish people if they want peace in Kurdistan.
Kani Yilmaz spent nearly three years in prison in Britain, having come to discuss finding a peaceful solution to the war in Kurdistan and self-determination for the Kurdish people. He has said he will not seek judicial review of the Home Secretary's decision, having had his confidence in the British judicial system severely undermined by the courts' passive endorsement of the extradition request. But he will use the German courts as an opportunity "to present the case of the Kurdish people and to expose the collaboration of Europe's governments with the Turkish state".