A senior judge in a United Nations tribunal says a Turkish judge assigned to a war crimes panel has been detained by authorities in Turkey in the aftermath of the failed July coup against Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Theodor Meron, president of the UN's Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, said on November 9 that Ankara should immediately release Judge Aydin Sefa Akay from detention.
Meron said that despite having diplomatic immunity, Akay was detained in Turkey on September 21 "in relation to allegations connected to the events of July 2016 directed against the constitutional order of Turkey."
Akay is a member of a five-judge panel assigned in July to review the judgment of Rwanda's former planning minister, Augustin Ngirabatware.
Ngirabatware was sentenced by the international Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to 30 years in prison for inciting, instigating, aiding and abetting acts of genocide in 1994 by Hutu extremists that killed more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.