Christoph Flügge warns over ‘shocking’ moves by Trump administration and Turkey
A senior judge has resigned from one of the UN’s international courts in The Hague citing “shocking” political interference from the White House and Turkey.
Christoph Flügge, a German judge, claimed the US had threatened judges after moves were made to examine the conduct of US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Turkey’s government had earlier made “baseless” allegations to end the tenure of a Turkish judge sitting on a United Nations court known as the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals with the connivance of the UN, he claimed.
Aydın Sefa Akay was removed following his arrest and subsequent release over alleged links to Fethullah Gülen, the US-based cleric blamed by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for a failed coup attempt.
“Turkey applied its veto against Judge Akay,” Flügge said. “We, the other judges, immediately protested. But his tenure was nevertheless not extended by the UN secretary general. And with that, he’s gone.”
Flügge, who had been a permanent judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) since 2008, told the German newspaper Die Zeit that he had concluded in the wake of the developments that the “diplomatic world” saw no value in an independent judiciary.
He warned that the UN’s blind eye to Turkey’s intervention had set an alarming precedent.
“Every incident in which judicial independence is breached is one too many,” he said. “Now there is this case, and everyone can invoke it in the future. Everyone can say: ‘But you let Turkey get its way.’ This is an original sin. It can’t be fixed.”
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