The State Security Senate obviously wants to end the trial against Kenan Ayaz before the Hamburg Higher Regional Court as quickly as possible, and requests by the defence for further evidence are consistently rejected.
The trial against Kurdish politician Kenan Ayaz at Hamburg Higher Regional Court continued on Wednesday. As usual, the atmosphere in the courtroom was very tense. When a trial observer complained about the poor acoustics in the audience area, Judge Wende-Spors reacted with annoyance and said that the system was switched on and the complaint was unfounded. After another complaint from the audience, the hearing was interrupted. Wende-Spors went to the area separated by a screen herself and then announced that the acoustics were perfect. ‘It was very difficult to follow the proceedings today. Obviously the speakers to the auditorium were not switched on or the volume was turned down,’ said a trial observer.
To the surprise of the visitors, the judge also announced that the court was actually finished with its programme. As the court’s witnesses were heard, the State Security Senate obviously wants to end the trial as quickly as possible and is therefore pressuring the defence, whose requests for further evidence are consistently rejected.
Now that the court has no substantive evidence in favour of the prosecution, it is only concerned with the files that were introduced in the so-called self-reading procedure. These are numerous files with translations of telecommunications surveillance and text messages. The problem with the translation of these documents is that they were not only translated by a single translator, who has apparently worked for the police in Bremen for many years, but also arbitrarily edited, commented on and even falsified. Unlike in the proceedings against the activist Abdullah Öcalan in Frankfurt am Main, the translation was not checked by an independent expert.
In a motion, defence lawyer Antonia von der Behrens objected to the use of many of the files introduced in the self-reading proceedings. For example, when comparing the LKA summaries and the BKA translations, it became clear that the LKA translator had falsified the summaries by always writing ‘comrade’ when supposedly speaking of a higher cadre, even when this word had not been used at all. On the other hand, he omitted the actual salutations with ‘comrade’ when the interlocutors were supposedly people with no or a lower function. The translation of ‘arkadaş’ [boyfriend/girlfriend] as ‘comrade’ was not even criticised.
The defence has sharply criticised for many hearings that the alleged evidence against Kenan Ayaz is not accessible to the public. The example of these falsified translations shows how important this would be. These are more than 30 files that were introduced in a self-reading procedure. This means that the public has no control over the evidence, trial observers criticise.
The trial against Kenan Ayaz will continue on Friday, 16 February, at 1 pm.
Further dates are on 26 February, 11, 12 and 13 March and 17, 19 and 24 April.