Turkey fails in final attempt to extradite media boss from UK

BCL partner, Michael Drury speaks to The Guardian following the high court ruling to uphold his client’s extradition case as politically motivated.

On Tuesday 9th April (2019), Mrs Justice Elisabeth Laing upheld the ruling and dismissed the Turkish government’s appeal. She discharged İpek, along with Ali Çelik and Talip Büyük, from the extradition request.

Below is a short extract from the article, that can be read in full in The Guardian*:

‘Turkey has failed in a final attempt to extradite a dispossessed media proprietor to Ankara to face financial charges allegedly related to the 2016 failed military coup.

The high court in London upheld a ruling that the case against Hamdi Akın İpek, whose newspapers and TV stations have been confiscated by Turkish officials for criticising President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime, was politically motivated.

İpek, who has lived in Britain since 2015, was arrested last year when the Turkish government began extradition proceedings against him and several other expatriate Turkish citizens.’

Michael Drury, a partner at BCL Solicitors who represented İpek, said:

‘“It is to be hoped that the Turkish administration will stop pursuing plainly political cases and take steps to bring back the rule of law to the Turkish criminal justice system, which has been all but lost.

“It is also to be hoped that the British government will now bring its influence to bear on the Turkish government to prevent abuses: it can do that immediately by refusing to certify extradition requests from Turkey where those requested are to be the subject of political prosecutions and trials, and are at real risk of mistreatment.”’

* This article was first published by The Guardian on Tue 9 Apr 2019 17.17 BST. For further details please visit The Guardian.

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Author:

BCL partner, Michael Drury has a diverse practice, ranging from extradition (where he has successfully represented senior Ministers and others in former Soviet Union states, defeating extradition claims and securing the removal of and preventing the issue of Red Notices) to representing individuals in regulatory proceedings brought by the FCA (in LIBOR and other matters); acting in criminal investigations by the SFO (including for corporates and individuals in bribery and corruption cases, and in LIBOR); acting in investigations by the Information Commissioner’s Office (in the spin off from NCA investigations into ‘blagging’); and representing individuals in arenas as wide ranging as the Metropolitan Police investigation into the alleged involvement of British officials in the transfer of individuals to Libya under the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to fraud investigations by a variety of police forces in England and Wales.