Mustafa Emre Çabuk is out of prison but not out of trouble. The Turkish national, who for the past 15 years ran a Gülen school in the Georgian capital, Tblisi, is the latest international educator caught up in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anti-Gülenist campaign.
The manager of a private school linked to the exiled Turkish preacher Fethullah Gülen was released on bail by a Tbilisi court on Monday. Mustafa Emre Cabuk was arrested in May, 2017 in what appeared to be a case of pressure exerted by Turkey on Georgian authorities to crack down on institutions associated with Fethullah Gülen.
Rebecca Harms, a member of the European Parliament and co-president of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly visited Mustafa Emre Çabuk, a Turkish school administrator who was arrested by Georgian authorities last year at the request of the Turkish government, on Thursday according to her post on her Twitter account.
21 Georgian NGOs have recently signed a joint statement addressing the President of Georgia, with a request to grant refugee status to Mustafa Emre Çabuk and his family, with the statement being published on Georgian Young Lawyer’s Association website.
Since the attempted coup of July 15, 2016 the Government of Turkey has engaged in illegal extraterritorial and extrajudicial actions been taking strict measures to silence dissidents in other countries from various ideologies recently. Participants of Gulen Movement -known also as Hizmet Movement- have been the main target of this global witch-hunt and abductions.
“To be a teacher is not a crime,” said Rebecca Harms, a German politician who is current head of the Greens-European Free Alliance in the EU parliament. She was speaking at a press conference in Tbilisi after visiting Mustafa Emre Cabuk in prison on Sunday.
A detained Gülen school official is asking for asylum in Georgia in order to avoid extradition to Turkey, where he may face brutal and inhumane treatment, according to his lawyers. Georgia detained Mustafa Emre Cabuk in May. He is one of the managers of Demirel private schoool in Tbilisi.
Georgia’s Ministry of Refugees has refused to grant a refugee status to Mustafa Emre Çabuk, a manager at the Private Demirel College, a school linked to Turkish opposition political figure Fethullah Gülen. Mr Çabuk was detained in Tbilisi on Turkey’s request.
The family of Mustafa Emre Çabuk, a manager at the Private Demirel College who was detained in Tbilisi on Turkey’s request, is asking for protection from Georgia’s State Security Service, after receiving several threats on social media with Turkish names.
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have gathered at the government administration in support of Mustafa Emre Cabuk, one of the managers of the Turkish Demirel College, who was sentenced to three-month pre-extradition detention.
Eight non-governmental organizations have called on the Georgian government to refrain from returning detained Turkish teacher to back home where “he will be possibly subjected to political persecution, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. “[He] will have no access to fair trial,” said a statement, released on May 31.