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ANKARA: A Council of Europe delegation on Friday denounced the arrest of a Turkish human rights and activist who was detained after delivering a speech critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government at a session of Europe’s leading human rights body.
Enes Hocaogullari, who took part in a March meeting of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, as one of Turkiye’s youth delegates, was arrested last month after he criticized the detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu and other opposition figures.
The 23-year-old activist also spoke out against alleged police violence during protests that erupted following Imamoglu’s arrest.
Marc Cools, president of a delegation of the Council of Europe’s local and regional authorities congress, said there was no legal justification for Hocaogullari’s prosecution or detention.
“Silencing Enes is silencing youth — and silencing youth is silencing democracy itself,” Cools said after visiting Hocaogullari in prison Friday and meeting a day earlier with Turkiye’s deputy justice minister and other officials in Ankara.
Hocaogullari was taken into custody at Ankara’s Esenboga airport in August and later charged with “publicly disseminating misleading information” and “inciting hatred and enmity among the public.”
The first hearing of his trial is scheduled for Sept. 8.
“We hope that justice will prevail, that all charges will be dropped, that he will be immediately released,” Cools said.
Imamoglu, a popular opposition figure seen as the main rival to Erdogan in the presidential elections, was arrested in March over allegations of corruption, which he strongly denies. He was officially nominated as the presidential candidate for the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, following his imprisonment.
Several other CHP mayors and municipal employees have also been arrested as part of investigations into alleged corruption. The CHP denies the accusations.
Critics view the arrests as a politically motivated crackdown on the CHP, which made significant gains in local elections last year. The government denies the accusation, asserting that the judiciary operates independently and that the investigations target serious corruption allegations.
Opposition parties and human rights organizations have accused Erdogan of undermining democracy and curbing freedom of expression during his more than two decades in power.

NICOSIA: Egypt said on Friday it would not tolerate mass displacement of Palestinians and what it described as genocide, continuing to ratchet up its criticism of Israel’s Gaza offensive as thousands of residents of Gaza City defied Israeli orders to leave.
“Displacement is not an option and it is a red line for Egypt and we will not allow it to happen,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told reporters in Nicosia.
“Displacement means liquidation and the end of the Palestinian cause and there is no legal or moral or ethical ground to evict people from their homeland,” he said.
His comments are in line with a hardening of Egyptian language this year about Israel’s conduct in the enclave, which borders Egypt, even as it has worked with Qatar and the US to try to mediate a ceasefire in the almost two-year-old war.
Repeating accusations of genocide levelled by the Egyptian leadership against Israel in recent months, he added: “What is happening on the ground is far beyond the imagination. There is a genocide in motion there, mass killing of civilians, artificial starvation created by the Israelis,” Abdelatty said.
Israeli authorities did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Israel has in the past strongly denied that its actions in Gaza amount to genocide and says they are justified as self defense. It is fighting a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague that accuses it of genocide and which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned as “outrageous.”
Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in October 2023,.
More than 64,000 Palestinians have since been killed, Gaza health authorities say, with much of the densely populated enclave laid to ruin and its residents facing a humanitarian crisis.
Israel began an offensive in Gaza City on August 10, in what Netanyahu says is a plan to defeat Hamas militants in the part of Gaza where Israeli troops fought most heavily in the war’s initial phase. It now controls about 40 percent of Gaza City, a military spokesperson said on Thursday.
Much of Gaza City was laid to waste in the war’s initial weeks in October-November 2023. About a million people lived there before the war, and hundreds of thousands are believed to have returned to live among the ruins, especially since Israel ordered people out of other areas and launched offensives elsewhere.