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UNSAFE HAVEN: BALKANS SEES RISE IN TURKISH ASYLUM REQUESTS
INVESTIGATION
Unsafe Haven: Balkans Sees Rise in Turkish Asylum Requests
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Hundreds of Turkish citizens have applied for asylum in the countries of the Balkans since a failed 2016 coup, seeking protection from a crackdown being waged well beyond the borders of RecepTayyipErdogan’s Turkey, BIRN has discovered.
Turkish flag in Istanbul. Photo: Wikipedia.
If it was once rare for Turks to seek asylum in the countries of the Balkans, since mid-2016 it has become a regular occurrence, according to an investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.
While the reasons behind any individual request are confidential, the timing of the rise points to a widespread fear of the long arm of Turkish law under President RecepTayyipErdogan since he put down a coup attempt in July 2016.
The asylum requests have put a number of Balkan states in a diplomatic bind, caught between the diplomatic and financial benefits of warm relations with Ankara and the expectation of the European Union that they resist Ankara’s efforts to round up followers of the cleric it accuses of masterminding the failed putsch.
The trend is most obvious in Kosovo, notably since late March 2018 when six Turks were plucked from the streets and spirited to Turkey in an operation led by Turkish intelligence agents, outside of any legal extradition process.
Not a single Turkish citizen had sought asylum in Kosovo between 2014 and 2016. In 2017, according to the Interior Ministry, seven sought official refuge. In 2018, there were 76, of which 50 have been approved. Altogether, in Kosovo, Bosnia, North Macedonia and Bulgaria, more than 250 Turkish citizens have submitted asylum requests since 2016, according to figures obtained by BIRN.
NazmiUlus, the headteacher of the Mehmet Akifschool in Kosovo, part of an international network of educational institutions created by the US-based cleric FethullahGulen, was granted asylum in August this year.
He said the lives of his staff had been turned upside down since Ankara pointed the finger of blame for the coup at Gulen and showed its readiness to use covert means to round up his followers abroad. DIMITARGANEV, ERALDINFAZLIU AND SOFIA-ELPIDAKARTALI | BIRN | ATHINË, PRISHTINË, SOFJE
“I try not to be alone, not to be late home and I always tell my wife where I am,” Ulus told BIRN.
“For security issues in Kosovo, most of our friends have asked for asylum,” he said. Asylum as protection Since crushing the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, Erdogan has waged a campaign of revenge; roughly 150,000 civil servants, soldiers, police officers, teachers, judges and academics have been fired or suspended from their public sector jobs over suspected links to the Gulen network, while more than 70,000 people have been jailed pending trial.
The EU and international rights group say he is using the coup attempt as a pretext to silence dissent. Ankara says the scale of the crackdown simply speaks to the depth of Gulen’s reach in the Turkish state. But Erdogan has not stopped at the borders of Turkey. Across the Balkans and elsewhere, Ankara has pursued those linked to Gulen, be it through covert means or strong-arm tactics backed by Turkey’s diplomatic and financial clout in the region.
Turks who spoke to BIRN say they live in constant fear that weak authorities in Balkan states will buckle under the pressure. Judging by the figures, many see formal asylum as their only possible protection.
Like Kosovo, neighbouring North Macedonia has also seen a spike in asylum applications by Turkish citizens; from zero in 2016 the number jumped to 13 in 2017 and 10 in 2018.
In Bosnia, from zero applications in 2014 and three in 2015, before the coup, the number shot up in 2016 to 19, then 29 in 2017 and 22 in 2018. So far this year, 53 Turks have applied for asylum in Bosnia, bringing the post-coup total to 123.
In Kosovo, staff at the Gulenist schools fear another operation by Turkish intelligence like that carried out in March 2018. “We can see that Erdogan is very powerful and Kosovo’s democracy cannot resist that pressure,” said one employee at the Mehmet Akif College, who declined to be named. Another, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “Sometimes when we see the police we have mixed feelings; we feel protected but also scared that something like March 29 could be repeated.”
Ulus, the headteacher, said he suspected the Turkish authorities would try “other ways” to round up perceived opponents. “I suspect that our friends are still at risk everywhere,” he told BIRN.
The March 2018 ‘renditions’ triggered the dismissal of Kosovo’s interior minister and security chief, after then Prime Minister RamushHaradinaj said he had been kept in the dark. A subsequent parliamentary probe identified 31 violations of laws and procedures and said in February that it would send its findings to the prosecutor’s office.
But Turkey has tried more conventional methods too.
Pressure for extradition Last year, North Macedonia received 17
extradition requests from Turkey, the justice ministry told BIRN, without giving figures for previous years. One person was extradited. In April this year, Turkish Defence Minister HulusiAkar visited Skopje, where he called for the extradition of “terrorist structures” of the Gulen movement. Akar also visited Pristina during the same trip, but authorities in Kosovo did not respond to BIRN questions regarding the number of extradition requests it had received from Turkey since the coup.
Bulgaria, too, has seen a rise in the number of asylum applications and extradition requests.
In 2014 and 2015, Turkey sent a total of 11 extradition requests to neighbouring Bulgaria – five and six respectively – according to data from the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice. One request was approved in 2014 and three in 2015.
The rate picked up after the coup, with seven requests in 2016, 11 in 2017 and eight in 2018. Half were approved. Besides
those Turks extradited, another eight were deported from Bulgaria in 2016, a swifter and legally less complex process than extradition.
In August 2016, for example, Turkish businessman Abdullah Buyuk, a Gulen follower, was deported from Bulgaria to Turkey even after two Bulgarian courts ruled against an extradition request from Turkey. The Bulgarian Interior Ministry alleged he did not have the necessary legal documents to remain in the country, meaning he could simply be deported.
MehmedYumer, one of the publishers of the Bulgarian-Turkish Zaman newspaper that closed down soon after the attempted coup, said Bulgaria was not a destination of choice for many Turks.
“After the Buyuk case, the message was spread, ‘Don’t come to Bulgaria’,” he said. “And they don’t come anymore, even people who have worked here. This was the litmus test.” Bosnia ‘blacklist’ Even so, the number of asylum applications in Bulgaria is slightly up – from around 10 in 2014 and one in 2015 to 17 in 2016, 18 in 2017 and 13 in 2018, according to statistics obtained by BIRN from the State Agency for Refugees via a Freedom of Information request. BIRN could not ascertain whether the 2018 figure was the full figure for the year.
Only one of the applications was successful, in 2014.
Members of the Gulenist circle in Bulgaria said things had changed for the movement.
“The so-called intellectual circle still exists,” said one, on condition of anonymity. “But its means of expression, such as the Zaman Bulgaria newspaper, were shut down,” he told BIRN.
“People who still hold connections to Turkey withdraw from you.”
Unlike Bulgaria, Bosnia has resisted pressure to extradite any Turks, despite strong ties between Sarajevo and Ankara.
At least 10 Turks in Bosnia are reportedly on a Turkish ‘blacklist’ for extradition, but Bosnian courts have so far rejected all extradition requests on the grounds that neither the European Union nor the United Nations or individual European states recogniseGulen’s movement as a “terrorist organisation”, as Turkey claims.
Speaking at a press conference in July, NedimAdemovic, one of the lawyers for the wanted Turks, said Bosnia was under pressure to resolve the case not by legal means but “through political deals”.
“Bosnia is a small country under big pressure,” he said. “It should defend its international legal reputation.” Turks to Greece, Germany Since the failed coup, Turks have flowed across the country’s western border into Greece.
Last year, with 7,918 Turks were registered as crossing illegally by land and sea to Europe via the so-called Eastern Mediterranean Route used by migrants and refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The European Asylum Support Office reported around 24,500 Turkish asylum requests in 2018 in the EU, a 48 per cent increase on the previous year. In 2018, Turks predominantly filed their requests in Germany and Greece – 10,160 and 4,820 respectively.
In the first two months of this year alone, a total of 996 Turks passed into Greek territory, FRONTEX, the agency that manages the protection of European borders, said.
“My friends were abducted” In September 2018, seven alleged Gulenists were abducted in Moldova and flown to Turkey.
“Three of the seven teachers who were abducted in Moldova were my friends,” said Ahmet, whose real name and location BIRN agreed not to publish.
Ahmet said he feared he was next, despite the fact that the security services in the Balkan country where he currently lives have, he said, promised him and his friends protection.
But he also said security officers had warned him they would be helpless if Turkish intelligence mounted a covert operation.
The officers said he and his friends could be forced back to Turkey by sea or land. They could even be taken across borders in a diplomatic vehicle. And although a court has rejected an extradition request Ankara sent for Ahmet, he said he remained fearful.
Ahmet cited a judge in Azerbaijan who ruled last year that Turkish citizen Mustafa Ceyhan should not to be extradited. But he still ended up being bundled into a car outside the court and sent to Turkey.
“The Erdogan regime wants to kidnap people connected to the Gulen movement,” Ahmet told BIRN. “They try to do it everywhere. However, they only succeed when they have the permission of the countries these people live in and have made agreements with the government.”
“Turkey has cancelled my passport, but Interpol didn’t accept that,” he said. When his passport expires, Ahmet said he would be unable to renew it in the embassy so he would seek asylum in “a proper country”.
No Silver Bullet for Scourge of Illegal Arms in Kosovo Two decades since the end of the war, many Kosovars say they still feel safer with a gun in the house.
From a dusty black sack, Selim carefully removes a pistol, an automatic rifle, a hunting gun and dozens of bullets.
Firearms have been a fixture in Selim’s home for longer than he can remember. Yet none of them are registered.
A former guerrilla fighter in Kosovo’s 1998-99 war to throw off Serbian repression, the 65-year-old resisted a call for the victorious but disbanded rebels to hand in their weapons.
“It is simply matter of feeling. I want to keep guns in the house. You can never know what might happen,” Selim [not his real name] said in his home in a remote village in the Drenica region of central Kosovo, once a stronghold of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA.
“I don’t want to declare or register them. They are mine and I paid for them. If I do, sooner or later they’ll come and confiscate them.”
Since the war, repeated government campaigns calling on Kosovars to disarm have had only limited impact on the number of illegal firearms, estimated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs at some 250,000 in a population of 1.8 million people.
Every year they kill dozens of people, many of them in accidents.
“People still feel safer having a firearm at home,” said Destan Mustafa, head of the ministry’s Arms, Munitions and Explosives Division.
“It is not a matter of tradition, it is much more the result of living under various repressive regimes,” Mustafa told BIRN.
“For many, having an arm still represents security. Kosovo Albanians used to rely on their own security measures, so two decades are not enough to change something that has deep roots.”
Little appetite to declare arms According to Mustafa, the threat of legal punishment and vigorous confiscation efforts have managed to cut the number of illegal arms from 350,000 to 250,000 over the past decade.
Some 20,000 are registered. But according to a report by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, Kosovars own an estimated 436,000 firearms, both licit and illicit.
Under the latest campaign, in December 2018 the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued an executive order for those in possession of illegal arms to declare them and seek permits without fear of punishment under a law that otherwise carries a punishment of up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 7,500 euros.
But less than 2,000 people took up the offer.
Meanwhile, police are confiscating weapons at an average rate of 1,300 a year.
But not all illegal weapons are stored in sacks like Selim’s.
A licensed taxi driver in the capital, Pristina, described ferrying arms for trade across Kosovo and beyond.
“We keep them spread out in different locations and we also transport them in small numbers and small amounts of ammunition,” the man told BIRN on condition of anonymity.
“I transport them from one location to another and sometimes beyond the border.”
According to police, the most popular illegal arms in Kosovo are the Italian Beretta and Czech CZ 75 semi-automatic pistols, the Austrian Glock and guns made by Serbian-based Zastava. Celebratory gunfire The proliferation of illegal weapons since the breakup of Yugoslavia remains an issue for many of the states that emerged from the ashes of the socialist federation.
Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia are among the top 25 countries in the world in terms of the percentage of firearms owned per civilian, according to Small Arms Survey.
ArtanZaimi, manager of the Pristina-based private arms seller ‘Reload’, one of 16 companies authorised to import arms, said interest was on the rise. “Since we got a license to import and sell arms we see that the level of clients is increasing,” he told BIRN.
Zaimi said pistols, the most sought-after weapon, sell for between 500 and 5,000 euros and that a growing number of clients are interested in shooting as “a kind of passion and sport.”
But he warned of the threat from illegal traders who sometimes modify old weapons for resale.
“In the wrong hands they can be activated easily, making them potentially deadly again,” Zaimi told BIRN.
The United Nations Development Programme, which provides support for Kosovo’s efforts to collect and destroy illegal arms, said 14,294 had been confiscated and some 10,000 destroyed between 2008, when Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, and 2017.
The UNDP office in Pristina told BIRN it was trying to raise awareness of the danger posed by celebratory gunfire at family celebrations, still widespread in Kosovo.
The European Union too has stressed the need to halt the trafficking of arms and ammunition, expressing serious concern this year at “the involvement of armed groups in arms smuggling”.
Mountainous terrain between Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania has made the border area a popular route for smugglers of illicit goods, including arms.
“More efforts should be put into making sure that guns aren’t circulated illegally,” the EU said.
But Selim, who used to work in an ammunition factory, said it was “too early” to expect to find a gun-free house in his village.
“These weapons were designed to kill but I don’t believe we can use them again,” he said. “But we live in a country that still is not quite stable. Let’s wait a little longer and then decide what to do with them.” SERBEZEHAXHIAJ | BIRN | PRISTINA
PUPPET MASTER: SLOVAKIA RECKONS WITH BACKSTORY TO REPORTER’S KILLING
The Slovak businessman accused of ordering the 2018 killing of an investigative reporter was pulling strings in the highest echelons of government and police, according to mobile phone messages leaked to the press.
MIROSLAVA GERMAN SIROTNIKOVA |BIRN | BRATISLAVA
Few people are as well known in Slovakia as Marian Kocner. He is neither a politician nor a showbiz celebrity. Yet his story, emerging from cracked mobile phone messages with the most powerful people in the country, reads like the script of an HBO crime saga in the making. Fifty-six year-old Kocner has long been notorious, but never ranked among the most prominent or wealthy of the Slovak oligarchs who have pulled political strings and amassed fortunes since Czechoslovakia emerged from the shadow of the collapsing Soviet Union and, in 1993, split peacefully in two.
Kocner owned mountain hotels and highend apartment blocks. But he did not build football stadiums or highways or collect exotic animals. Kocner’sspeciality was collecting people – politicians, prosecutors and judges were his favourite.
“Kocner wasn’t a real ‘big fish’. But he was very ruthless,” said Michal Magusin, editor in chief of the weekly political magazine . tyzden. Only now is the shocking extent of Kocner’s power, his connections and string-pulling at the highest levels of the Slovak state, coming to light, seven months since he was charged with ordering the 2018 murder of 27-year-old investigative journalist Jan Kuciak. The killing was, allegedly, a ruthless bid to silence Kuciak’s reporting on Kocner’s corrupt dealings. It claimed the life of his 27-year-old fiancée too, and unleashed a wave of popular anger that brought down a prime minister and helped install a liberal newcomer as president.
A series of leaked conversations extracted from Kocner’s phone and published over the summer by Dennik N and Aktuality.sk show the businessman mocking Kuciak after his death, discussing his preferred personnel changes in the courts and public prosecution, picking people to handle court cases and bragging about his political connections.
Kocner’s list of contacts reads like a who’s who of the Slovak political and economic elite. His conversations reveal how he got tax and property cases against him dismissed, and how he and another oligarch, Norbert Bodor, went out of their way to support the ruling SMER-SD political party and its leader, former PM Robert Fico.
“For the very first time, whatever people thought about someone is being clearly confirmed in real time, live,” said Adam Valcek, an investigative reporter at the SME daily. “And that is always shocking.”
MiroslavBeblavy, leader of the year-old liberal opposition Spolu [Together] party, told BIRN: “A lot of things that we considered to be some cheap conspiracy theories have prov
Marian Kocner’s Threema communication has shaken Slovak society. Photo: BIRN/Miroslava German Sirotnikova
en to be true. We didn’t want to believe that the mafia would control the state at such a high level.”
Untouchable The killing of Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, may go down as a watershed moment in Slovakia’s post-communist history – a crime that forced a reckoning with the cosy and corrupt alliance of politics and big money that had hollowed out Slovak democracy.
For more than two decades, Kocner was untouchable.
Kuciak had reported him to the police a few months before he died, after Kocner threatened him in a phone call. The police did nothing for weeks and then dismissed the case without even interviewing Kocner.
After the murder, investigators focused their efforts elsewhere, until mass protests forced Fico to resign and brought a change in command in law enforcement.
Several cases that local media had reported on in recent years were suddenly taken up by the police, including fraud allegations against Kocner that Kuciak had reported on. Soon after a new president of the Police Corps, Milan Lucansky, was installed in June 2018, Kocner was arrested for financial crimes stemming from a multi-million euro case involving an attempted takeover of TV Markiza.
Kocner has been in custody since June 2018 and in March 2019 was charged with ordering Kuciak’s killing. Pulling strings Slovak investigators, working with Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, cracked Kocner’s phone and gained access to encrypted communication via the instant messaging app Threema.
According to the special prosecutor overlooking the case, police found tens of thousands of messages in which Kocner talks to or about top state officials, politicians or law enforcement officers.
The messages from Kocner’s phone began leaking to the press last year and intensified over summer 2019.
They expose Kocner as a puppet master, pulling strings in the justice system to instigate criminal cases and dismiss others. He boasts about “handling” a case before the Supreme Court last year in which judges rejected a call to ban the far-right People’s Party Our Slovakia, refers to former PM Fico as “the boss” and appears to discuss with Monika Jankovska, a former senior Justice Ministry official nominated by Smer-SD, bribes for her and a number of judges for their help in the TV Markiza case.
Tibor Gaspar, Lucansky’s predecessor as Police Corps president, is described as Bodor’s “buddy”.
According to the messages, Kocner was in direct contact with former Interior Minister Robert Kalinak and with party leaders in the ruling coalition, while Bodor had meetings with the head of the special anti-graft prosecution, DusanKovacik.
Jankovska has since resigned. Police seized her mobile phone and she, along with several judges, is under investigation on suspicion of taking bribes or abusing public office. Kocner “was giving tasks to officials in judiciary bodies,” said Valcek, the SME reporter. “What surprised me was the scale of the problem. I never thought that one person could manage so many justice organs.”
Magusin, the .tyzden editor, said: “A lot of people didn’t believe it. I guess we all just kind of got used to the fact that’s just how it is in Slovakia.”
Kocner ‘loyal’ to ruling party Fico has denied any involvement and said it is thanks to Smer-SD that Kocner is behind bars.
Yet a story in Dennik N quoted from an investigator’s report submitted to court in a case involving Kocner that said: “It is evident that Kocner and Norbert Bodor act in favour the SMER political party. According to their communication, he [Kocner] is always willing to help Robert Fico; he is loyal to him; he makes sacrifices for SMER.”
Valcek said the blame ultimately lay with Smer-SD, which has dominated government in Slovakia for the past decade. “Even without Threema I think it would be completely fair to connect Kocner to Smer-SD,” he said. “It created the ecosystem in which people like Marian Kocner could operate, and they operated very well.”
Daniel Lipsic, a lawyer for the Kuciak family, told TV SME online in August: “He has been prosecuted not because of this government, but in spite of it, and thanks to certain brave prosecutors.”
So far, Kocner has been accused of seven crimes. Those charged with killing Kuciak on Kocner’s order have also been charged with plotting three other murders of prominent prosecutors and a former interior minister, the lawyer Lipsic.
One special prosecutor described the case as “extraordinary”.
“I’m convinced that the [Threema] communication is going to bring up a lot of dirt yet, but I think that it’s going to have a purifying effect on Slovakia,” Lipsic told TV SME. “If the key positions in the country, especially in justice and police, are held by moral, uncorrupted, brave people, Slovakia can be a different country.”
‘You never think…’ In Kocner’s cracked communication is an exchange with AlenaZsuzsova, the woman charged with handling Kuciak’s murder on behalf of Kocner.
“I’ll set up a Saint Jan Kuciak foundation – a patron of journalists,” Kocner tells her in the exchange shortly after the killing and as protests began rocking the country.
In Slovak slang, ‘patron’ also means ‘bullet’. “Who could be a better patron than a man who got a patron?” Kocner asks.
Yet Kuciak was not the only journalist in Kocner’s crosshairs.
Investigators have turned up evidence that Kocner was spying on a number of reporters, including Valcek, and their families with the help of the police.
Kocner had his contacts in the police pull up personal information from official databases on dozens of journalists and prosecutors. In September, three senior police officials were arrested in connection to the case. Valcek had also received threatening emails from Kocner and asked for police protection after Kuciak’s killing.
“I never felt that journalists were under any sort of violent threat here,” he said. While he had been sued or threatened with legal action before, “you never think that they could get you beaten up or killed, do you?”
“People like Kocner are prone to believing that journalists have to be hiding something, that they are as dirty as he is,” Valcek said. “It’s not true.”
Slovak reporter’s murder puts justice on trial
A murder investigation in Slovakia has blown the lid on corruption in the judiciary. Will it prove the catalyst for change?
MIROSLAVA GERMAN SIROTNIKOVA|BIRN | BRATISLAVA S lovakia’s president, ZuzanaCaputova, could not help but dwell on the scandal unfolding daily in print and online when she made a statement this month on the appointment of new judges to the country’s Constitutional Court.
Caputova was referring to the revelations emerging from an investigation into the businessman charged with ordering the 2018 murder of an investigative journalist, a killing that unleashed a wave of popular anger that, in part, swept liberal newcomer Caputova to power.
Messages extracted from the phone of Marian Kocner by investigators – and subsequently leaked to the press – have exposed his close contacts with senior judges and justice officials and, apparently, his ability to pull strings and buy court rulings. Eva Kovacechova, a lawyer and justice expert working with VIA IURIS, an NGO that promotes the rule of law, says she was left “shaken” by the level of abuse. But she warned that the problems facing the Slovak court system are far deeper and long-running than the current crisis over Kocner.
“The state of the justice system is not the result of the past one, two or even five years,” Kovacechova said in an interview with BIRN.
“We can’t say it is the result of the SMER government or any other government. It has gone on for a long time and we basically haven’t been able to reform the justice system in a fundamental, distinct way ever since the revolution,” she said, referring to the Velvet Revolution of 30 years ago and the fall of communism in then Czechoslovakia.
Worrying lack of trust On paper, the Slovak justice system should be in fine fettle – the legal framework is clear, the courts are independent, the justice system self-regulating.
In truth, the February 2018 killing of Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, both aged 27, and the investigation into Kocner have blown the lid on what many Slovaks already suspected – that the powerful have long been above the law.
According to an opinion poll this year, just 34 per cent of Slovaks trust the courts. The judiciary’s reputation has taken a hit from a seven-month saga stemming from the government’s failure to agree on candidates for the judicial panel of the Constitutional Court, rendering the court unable to function. Meanwhile, one of the most prominent judges in the country, Stefan Harabin of the Supreme Court, has been toying with a career sideline in politics, without hanging up his robes and gavel.
Then came the revelations that Kocner had possibly bribed a number of judges, including the state secretary at the Ministry of Justice.
“When I read the messages, especially the ones with the former state secretary Monika Jankovska, I have to admit, I was quite shaken,” Kovacechova told BIRN.
But the reaction of those inside the justice system itself disappointed her even more.
After police seized the phones of a number of judges linked to the Kocner case, the Association of Judges of Slovakia issued a statement condemning the move. A number of prominent judges spoke out against the police and while Jankovska resigned her post at the ministry, she remained a judge.
Only after weeks of public pressure did Justice Minister Gabor Gal file a formal complaint against Jankovska and she was temporarily suspended from court.
Kovacechova has spent the past two decades working to make the justice system in Slovakia more open and transparent. Progress has been made, she said, but judges themselves remain resistant to change. “I think it’s very important for the judges not to be silent,” Kovacechova told BIRN. “They need to take a stand in critical situations like this.”
While in normal circumstances a judge should project caution and restraint, said Kovacechova, “This, on the contrary, is a time when judges should not be reserved but should voice their opinion on what is going on.”
“They should clearly communicate that this is something they don’t accept, because it is bad for everyone.” Culture of silence In one of Kocner’s leaked message threads, he brags to a judge about other judges he met at a party thrown by a prominent law firm in December 2017.
At the time, Kocner was facing tax fraud charges and was under investigation in another case. He was also allegedly plotting the murder of Kuciak, who had reported extensively on Kocner’s corrupt business
Photo: Eva Kovacechova’s collection
dealings.
Two of the judges Kocner claimed to have met at the party were subsequently picked for a judicial panel to probe Kocner’s contacts with Slovak judges.
The pair resigned this month, as did David Lindtner, head of a Bratislava court who, according to the leaked messages, had offered Kocner legal advice and exchanged dozens of friendly messages with him before he was arrested in June 2018.
Kovacechova said a culture of silence pervaded the justice system, where judges were discouraged from speaking out about abuses.
She traced this to Supreme Court judge Harabin’s term as Slovakia’s justice minister between 2006 and 2010, appointed by the populist People’s Party – Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, then the junior coalition partner to SMER.
The period saw a spate of disciplinary cases against judges deemed critical of the status quo.
“This system that Harabin created meant that disciplinary hearings were used against judges who were even a little critical of the abuse of power and missteps in the judiciary,” Kovacechova said. “And that was enough for the majority of judges to remain silent and not say anything. I think that’s a problem and it’s the same today.”
Most Slovak judges are not corrupt, she said. They are just reluctant to put their heads above the parapet.
Harabin continues to dabble in politics, in violation of rules that he cannot also remain a judge. He put his Court position on hold while running, unsuccessfully, for president this year and has since launched a new political party called Homeland. Harabin has said that he considers the law prohibiting judges from running in elections to be unconstitutional and that he plans to challenge it in court.
“Justice should have a better name,” she said, “it should work differently and scandals like this should have no place there.” Caputova, in her statement, also tried to see the positive in the revelations surrounding Kocner and his court friends.
