ISTANBUL: Aydin Sefa Akay is one of over 41,000 people arrested and awaiting trial in Turkey in the wake of the unsuccessful July 15 coup plot to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But Akay is no ordinary prisoner. A former Turkish ambassador, he is a top judge attached to the UN’s Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT).

In that capacity, Akay had been working with the UN international court trying suspects over the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and his detention has paralysed proceedings into a key case.

On Tuesday a public hearing will be held in The Hague when all parties, including Turkey, can state their case in a bid to break the deadlock.

Akay’s family say he is being held illegally following his detention at his home in September and ridicule accusations that he had a link to the coup plot.

Specifically, he stands accused by the Turkish authorities of downloading and using a messaging app called ByLock which Ankara says was used by the plotters to prepare the coup.

“On September 21 the police came to the house (and) took my father to prison,” his daughter Meric Akay said at her home in Milan.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2017