European Rights Court Censures Moldova for Deporting Turks

The European Court of Human Rights, ECHR ruled against Moldova on Monday, saying that Chisinau violated the rights of the seven professors by deporting them to Turkey in September 2018.

The seven Turkish citizens, who worked at a chain of private high schools called Horizont, were illegally detained and handed over to the Turkish authorities without being charged with committing any crimes in Moldova.

The schools are reported to be connected to the movement headed by exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, which Ankara considers to be a terrorist group and holds responsible for the failed coup in Turkey in 2016.

Officers from Moldova's Security and Intelligence Service arrived at several of the Horizont schools on the morning of September 6, 2018 and detained the seven Turks along with a teenager who was released soon afterwards.

The detention of the seven Turkish citizens by the Moldovan authorities prompted protests in the US and Canada, in front of Moldova's consulates in New York, Washington DC, Toronto and Chicago.

During the ECHR case, the Moldovan government acknowledged that Turkish citizens were detained but insisted that this would have been justified and that the professors "would not have opposed expulsion to their country of origin".

Chisinau's arguments were dismissed by the ECHR ruling, with the court noting that in the applications for asylum that the Turkish citizens filed in Moldova before their arrests, they clearly expressed their fear of being politically persecuted in their country of origin.

"The removal of a person from a country where close members of his or her family are living may amount to an infringement of the right to respect for family life," noted the judges in their ruling.

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