Sentenced to ten years, Kurdish MP faces removal from Turkish Parliament

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) - A regional high court in Turkey upheld a prison sentence of ten years for Kurdish lawmaker Selma Irmak over charges of "membership in a terrorist group" on Wednesday, paving the way for her ouster from Parliament.

Opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) member Irmak had received the sentence in 2017 for political activities and speeches in the Kurdish provinces of Diyarbakir, Mardin, and Hakkari.

Prosecutors argued that Irmak's previous speeches at political rallies and meetings constituted "propaganda for a terrorist group," a charge commonly made by Turkish officials, including those in the judicial system, against those they see as supporting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a group engaged in a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish army.

Judges convicted Irmak of "leading and aiding" the PKK but absolved her of accusations of "attendance in meetings, walks, and protests banned by authorities."

Authorities have been holding Irmak, a representative from Mardin, in pre-trial detention since her arrest in late 2016 in Kocaeli, east of Istanbul.

Police apprehended her in the early days of an ongoing, massive crackdown on members of Kurdish political parties, as well as others seen as opposing Ankara's policies, which began with midnight raids on the houses of HDP's former co-leader Selahattin Demirtas and 11 other lawmakers.

Prosecutors had asked the judge for a longer sentence of 52 years and six months in prison for the lawmaker. Since her college years in the 1990s, she has spent over a dozen years in jail for charges related to her civic activism and political affiliations.

In the recent hearings, she appeared before the court only once, through a teleconference system widely used by the Turkish judiciary in criminal trials.

According to parliamentary procedure, once the ruling against her is officially communicated to parliament and is read before the assembly, she will lose her seat.

Nine HDP lawmakers have already been stripped of their seats on parliament as a result of various convictions, at least one of them for 'insulting' President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Editing by John J. Catherine