Deputy prime minister slams German courts

BRUSSELS - Anatolia News Agency

The recent actions of Germany’s judiciary have hurt people’s sensitivities, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ has said. AA Photo

The recent actions of Germany’s judiciary have hurt people’s sensitivities, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ has said, complaining about the different treatment meted out to the sole survivor of a neo-Nazi cell and five Turks accused of killing a German.

“There is a defendant who is suspected of killing 10 people in the neo-Nazi trial, and her trial is continuing in a very comfortable setting. No one opposes that, but there is another ongoing case in Berlin where five Turks are being tried for allegedly killing a German citizen. Procedural law is the same but they were brought into the court in a glass cage,” Bozdağ said during a conference in Brussels.

The National Socialist Underground (NSU) cell is suspected of involvement in the killings of 10 people, eight of them Turks, between 2000 and 2007. A trial against the cell’s survivor member, Beate Zschaepe, is continuing in a Munich court.

“One of them is a member of a terror group and stands on trial for racism. In the other case, they have no such record. If you look at it, if he killed someone he was a murderer but the other one is also a murderer. But if courts made separate judgments and different procedural implementations, then people would ask: Where is justice? Where is conscience? Where is the state of law?” Bozdağ said.

“Then, when those who implement the laws said, ‘We are not fair,’ I have a right to say ‘I wonder.’ If there is equality, you should implement procedures on everyone.”

Bozdağ said perpetrators could be encouraged with such acts and that legal experts should fulfill their duties.

The deputy prime minister said in March that the neo-Nazi murder trial did not have any significance anymore for Turkey on the grounds that its result is “pre-determined.”