ICC Note: As imprisoned American Pastor Andrew Brunson’s case continues to linger in the judicial process, it is increasingly becoming clear that he is being used as a political hostage. His next court date, scheduled in mid-July, will take place after Turkey’s snap elections. President Erdogan has repeatedly raised the stakes by attempting to engage in hostage diplomacy. Pastor Brunson’s welfare has grown worse the longer he has remained imprisoned, now over 560 days.             

05/10/2018 Turkey (The Atlantic) –  On October 7, 2016, Andrew Brunson, a 50-year-old American pastor working as a missionary in Turkey, received a call from the police requesting that he come in for a visit. Since 1995, Brunson had lived in the city of Izmir in western Turkey, serving as a Presbyterian pastor. When the police got in touch, he had been awaiting the renewal of his residence permit, and figured it might be ready. Instead, the police detained him on suspicions of collaborating with terrorists, and imprisoned him without charges for the next year and a half. Expectations for a quick dismissal or deportation order diminished, as Brunson was moved from one jail to another. At times, he shared a cell made for eight prisoners with 21 others, his lawyer, Ismail Cem Halavurt, told me.

A few weeks before April 16 of this year, the start of Brunson’s trial, he finally learned of the charges against him: espionage and committing crimes on behalf of terrorist organizations. These terrorist groups include the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging a decades-long separatist insurgency in Turkey, and the followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamist cleric living in Pennsylvania who the Turkish government blames for orchestrating a failed coup in 2016. Brunson’s trial ended with the judge upholding a judicial order that he remain behind bars until May 7, his next court date. If found guilty, Brunson could face 35 years in prison—a common fate for state dissidents and those suspected of taking part in the attempted coup, which sparked a wave of mass purges and arrests by the state that have implicated more than 150,000 people.

Last August, Brunson’s 20-year-old daughter, Jacqueline Furnari, visited him in prison. By that point, he had lost 50 pounds. “He looked different, he sounded different. … It was really hard to see my dad like that,” she told me when we spoke on the phone. “I know he didn’t like having me see him like that. Kind of weak and broken and desperate.”

For Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, Brunson’s case offered a chance to engage in a sort of hostage diplomacy. In a speech last fall, Erdogan appeared to link Brunson’s release to his demands for the extradition of Gulen by the Trump administration. (U.S. officials claim they have yet to receive adequate evidence to fulfill the request.) “‘Give us the pastor back,’ they say. You have one pastor as well. Give him to us,” Erdogan said, referring to Gulen. “Then we will try him [Brunson] and give him to you.”

Brunson’s ongoing incarceration also serves a clear political purpose for Erdogan.

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