By an act contravening all international law, an alliance of secret service forces handed over Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, to the very state that can give the least guarantee of a trial with any legal safeguards.

Ignoring the decision of Italian justice and the calls of international human rights organisations which opted against an extradition of Abdullah Öcalan to Turkey on his arrival in Rome, he was forcibly kidnapped and brought under the power of a state which heads the international statistics for torture and human rights violations.

The Kurdish leader was handed over to the military and politicians in Turkey who are responsible for the war in the Kurdish areas and its consequences: the destruction of 4,000 Kurdish villages, countless dead and more than three million displaced persons and refugees - consequences that could escalate into genocide.

No legal act can be more unjust than that in which the perpetrators are found to sit in judgement over the criminalised victim - mocking all the provisions of law.

No fair trial could be thought of in a Turkish court. This is more than sufficiently proven - not only by the total in-camera hearings, the 24-hour video surveillance, the humiliating broadcast of selected video clips and the extensive and unrelenting obstruction of any lawyer's work.

The European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg has already ruled that the State Security Courts of the Turkish Republic breach article 6 of the European Human Rights Convention: The required independence and impartiality of the judges is violated by the status of the military judges working in these courts. (Decision 09.06.98)

We fear that the decision against Abdullah Ocalan has been made a long time ago and that he will be a subjected to merely a show trial. Instead of the examination of evidence, a sentence will be passed, which will presumably be the death penalty which in turn is likely to be executed immediately.

The European governments have completely failed to take any constructive initiative to end the war in Turkey and resolve the Kurdish question. While they have done everything to provide conditions for a political and peaceful solution of the conflicts of the Palestinians at Madrid, the Bosnians at Dayton, and the Kosovo-Albanians at Rambouillet, we have been waiting in vain for a similar initiative for the Kurds for 15 years now.
The current tense situation still contains a chance: The Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan has to be seen as a key person in the political solution to the war in Kurdistan and this should be the context in which his wellbeing must be examined. The safety of Abdullah Ocalan, his freedom, is the acid test for Turkey to prove that it recognises and respects European democratic and legal values as a candidate for EU membership.

We call on the international community and its institutions:

• to send an international monitoring team accompanied by an independent delegation of medical doctors;
  
• to ensure a fair trial for Abdullah Ocalan in an international European court;
  
• to ensure international human rights standards prevail during his stay in Turkey;
  
• to immediately strive for an end to the war, to effectively deal with the causes of the conflict and call an international conference on Kurdistan;
• Turkey must stop its military operations in the Kurdish areas immediately and start a dialogue with the Kurdish side.