Jul 20 () –
The Turkish courts on Friday sentenced the opposition leader and former co-president of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) to two and a half years in prison on charges of “publicly insulting the government, the judiciary, the army and the security forces.”
“If I were an ultra-nationalist politician orchestrating murders in the heart of Ankara and threatening people, no case would be opened against me. Instead, you would protect me. But because I am a Kurdish politician exercising my right to criticise, you are prosecuting me,” Demirtas said during the trial, according to Turkish news portal Bianet.
In this regard, Demirtas has criticised the prosecution’s request for a sentence for being a “copy-paste without any legal basis” and has claimed that the trial has “political motivations”.
The verdict comes just two months after a court sentenced him to 42 years in prison on charges of undermining state unity during the 2014 riots against the Turkish siege of the Syrian city of Kobane, in which nearly 40 people died.
Demirtas has participated via video conference from prison, where he has been held since November 2016, when he was arrested on terrorism charges. He was subsequently sentenced in 2018 to four years and eight months in prison for “propaganda in favour of a terrorist organisation”.
During two days of riots over the assault on the Kurdish-majority Kobane that spread to several cities across Turkey, 37 people were killed, including a 16-year-old boy named Yasin Boru, who was killed while collecting donations in the southeast of the country and who has become a symbol of the victims of the violence during those days in October 2014. During the protests, 197 schools were burned and some 269 public buildings were destroyed.
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