Albanian Court Puts Turkish Activist in Custody After Extradition Demand

Protesters rally with pictures of victims of the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, April 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE/SEDAT SUNA. The Tirana Court on Friday ordered a custody remand for Julide Yazici, who is wanted for extradition by Turkey to serve a prison sentence for aiding a terrorist organisation – charges that she claims are motivated by her political activism. Yazici was arrested on August 4 at Tirana Airport while travelling from France to Albania after it was discovered that she was wanted for extradition to Turkey. The judge granted the prosecution’s custody request despite Yazici’s lawyer’s arguments that his client “holds political asylum status in France and poses no danger”, and could be placed under house arrest instead. The lawyer, Artan Shllaku, said that the decision will be appealed. Shllaku added that Yazici, who teaches at an elementary school in France, had visited Albania a year earlier to see relatives and had encountered no issues. Yazici is wanted by Turkish authorities to serve the remainder of a four-year prison sentence – three years, five months and 22 days – for providing logistical support to and participating in a terrorist organisation. According to a decision by the French National Court of Asylum dated November 2020, a document obtained by BIRN, Yazici was involved in political activism in Turkey and participated in the Gezi Park mass protests in 2013 against the administration led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. She actively supported the former People’s Democratic Party, HDP, a left-wing political group that supported Turkey’s Kurdish minority, and which later became the DEM Party. The French court decision granting asylum to Yazici stated that she was arrested in January 2016 “for having allowed a young woman she did not know, who had been introduced to her by a friend, to stay in her student room”. The French court decision in the document that Yazici had “a well-founded fear … of being persecuted if she returns to her country due to her political activism”. Yazici is not the first Turkish national to be arrested in Albania for extradition in controversial circumstances in recent years. Teachers and others linked to the movement previously led by the now-deceased cleric Fethullah Gulen, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the authorities under Erdogan, have also been detained and then deported in line with Ankara’s demands.