Turkish court rejects challenge of slain Armenian journalist’s family for dismissal of case due to statute of limitations
Stockholm center for freedom
A Turkish appeals court has ruled that slain journalist Hrant Dink’s family has no legal standing to challenge a lower court’s decision to dismiss charges on grounds of the expiration of the statute of limitations in a case linked to his murder, the Agos daily reported.
The 52-year-old Dink, editor-in-chief of the Turkish-Armenian bilingual Agos weekly, was shot dead outside the newspaper’s headquarters in central İstanbul on January 19, 2007. Ogün Samast, then 17, was arrested the following day, confessed to the murder and was sentenced to almost 23 years in prison in 2011. After serving nearly 17 years, he was released in November 2023.
The İstanbul Regional Court of Justice found that the offense —the killing of Hrant Dink— did not directly harm his family and that therefore they lacked the right to appeal the lower court’s ruling. The family’s lawyers had challenged the İstanbul 14th High Criminal Court’s decision to drop the case.
In January 2025 the high criminal court ruled that the proceedings against Samast and several other defendants on charges of “committing crimes on behalf of an armed terrorist organization without having membership that organization” should be dropped because the statute of limitations had expired on January 19, 2022.
The indictment, accepted in November 2023, referred to the faith-based Gülen movement as the “armed terrorist organization.” In March 2021 the İstanbul 14th High Criminal Court found that Dink’s murder was linked to the objectives of the movement and ordered prosecutors to file a criminal complaint against Samast and six others under this charge.
Lawyers representing the Dink family said they would appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Appeals.
For years, prosecutors have looked into alleged links between the suspects and the Gülen movement. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğa began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
