The trial against Kurdish activist Mustafa Çelik was continued at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court. The public prosecutor's office demanded two years and eight months imprisonment.

Initially, the court rejected the defense's request to hear Hamburg-based international law expert Norman Paech. The defense stated that it still wanted to introduce an interview with the KCK co-president Cemil Bayik. Since there were no further requests for evidence, presiding judge Taeubner closed the hearing of evidence and the prosecutor began his laborious plea, which, however, remained mostly incomprehensible in the auditorium due to the poor acoustics.

Using the usual clichés ranging from "tight cadre organization" to describing the PKK as an organization whose goal is "murder and manslaughter," he also reproduced verbatim the contents of a brochure published by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and disregarded German participation in the war in Kurdistan and the crimes of the Turkish army. While one listener described the Turkish army as fascist, the public prosecutor denied the guerrillas’ legitimacy, arguing that they also target non-combatants like "security guards" [by which he presumably meant the counter-guerrillas, so-called village guards].

On his own initiative, he also mentioned the ruling of the Brussels Court of Appeal, which had ruled that the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was not a "terrorist organization" but a party in an armed conflict. However, he said that this was of no significance to the Federal Court of Justice and, to his knowledge, had not been confirmed at all. The court thus appeared to have been misinformed, since the ruling of March 2019 had been confirmed by the last instance in January of this year.

Arguing that Mustafa Çelik had not distanced himself from the PKK and had also announced that he intended to continue working within the PKK, he considered a prison sentence of two years and eight months to be appropriate. This even exceeded the Celle sentence of August 2016 of two years and six months that Mustafa Çelik had served despite his serious illness.

The trial will continue on Monday, September 14, at 10:30 a.m. It is unclear whether the aforementioned interview with Cemil Bayik will then be read out or whether the lawyers will plead and possibly Mustafa Çelik himself will speak again at the end of the trial.