The Turkish judiciary today postponed for the seventh consecutive time the trial of French-Turkish sociologist Pinar Selek, who is on trial in absentia for “terrorism” and who has denounced a “mock trial”, after a brief hearing that lasted seven minutes.

Pinar Selek, a 54-year-old academic and writer who has fled to France, was arrested, tortured, and jailed in 1998 while completing a long series of interviews within the Kurdish community.

Selek’s trial, which is postponed every six months, will resume at 13:00 (local time and Greece time) on September 18, members of her support committee who attended the hearing in a court in Istanbul told Agence France-Presse.

As usual, today’s hearing ended a few minutes after it began.

Pinar Selek said she was “surprised by the speed” with which the court session ended.

“This new adjournment shows that they don’t know what to do. It is truly a travesty,” she told her committee from the headquarters of the League for Human Rights (LDH) in Paris.

The Turkish judiciary has been prosecuting the researcher, an expert on Kurdish feminist movements, for nearly 28 years and has already acquitted her four times.

“The judge said he was waiting for a response to an extradition request from France,” one of her supporters, a Turkish human rights campaigner who asked not to be named, told the French news agency.

During previous hearings, the court had already said it was waiting for a response from Interpol, the international criminal police, to her extradition request.

Pinar Selek was arrested in 1998 in Turkey for her work on the Kurdish community and subsequently accused of being linked to an explosion that claimed the lives of seven people in Istanbul’s spice market.

He was released in late 2000 and initially stayed to fight in Turkey before being forced into exile in April 2009. She states that she is convinced that if she returns to Turkey, she will be arrested upon arrival.

For MEP Melissa Camara, a member of the delegation of MPs and academics who arrived in Istanbul from France, “this umpteenth postponement of Pinar Selek’s trial unfortunately marks a new chapter in the judicial harassment she faces, which has only one goal, to crush her.”

“I have learned not to give up, and I know that I will fight until the end of my life. This trial is but a part of my battles,” insisted for her part Chelek, who lives and teaches in Nice, where she took French citizenship in 2017.

In addition to her work, she recently published a collection of her memoirs entitled “To lift the head” (“Lever la tête”, published by Université Paris Cité).