Turkey is infringing the judicial independence of a United Nations war crimes tribunal by holding one of its judges in detention despite an order to release him, the court ruled on Monday, referring the matter to the UN Security Council.
The UN court had earlier ordered Ankara to release Judge Aydin Sefa Akay, a Turkish national who was detained last year on suspicion of involvement in last July’s coup attempt against Turkey’s government.
Akay, a judge on the Mechanism for the International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), had been due to hear a request for the case of a Rwandan genocide convict to be reopened.