Top court to kick off appeals process in Ergenekon coup plot case in October

ANKARA

Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals has set the date for the first appeals hearing in the Ergenekon coup plot case, months after the Chief Prosecutor’s Office asked for a reversal of the rulings in the case from a methodological perspective.

The 16th Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeals will hold the first hearing in the appeal case on Oct. 6, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on July 21.

Some 274 coup-plot suspects were sentenced on Aug. 5, 2013 to hundreds of years’ imprisonment in total, with many high-ranking army members, journalists and academics given aggravated life sentences.

In April 2014, the long-awaited detailed ruling in the five-year-long marathon Ergenekon trial was issued, nearly eight months after the initial verdict, stating that the organization had targeted a long series of governments.

The mammoth detailed ruling, which ran to 16,798 pages over three volumes, said the court’s verdict was the “first judicial ruling on the deep state.” 

“It has been understood that the Ergenekon organization was established within the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) under the name of ‘headquarters houses,’” the court state in the ruling.