Turkey sentences senior Kurdish politician to 18 months in prison

Prosecutors have separately asked for up to 22 years and six months in prison for the HDP Deputy, accusing her of membership in the PKK.

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – A court in the Turkish province of Kocaeli on Tuesday sentenced the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputy co-chair Aysel Tugluk to one year and six months of imprisonment over “violation of the law” for organizing meetings and protests.

Tugluk, a former human rights lawyer and two-time lawmaker, has already been in a lengthy pre-trial detention since December 2016 when the police arrested her in a raid on her house in Ankara.

Kurdistan 24’s Turkish language service reported that Tugluk and her lawyer denied the charges during a Kocaeli hearing, demanding an acquittal.

Judicial authorities have been investigating Tugluk in a probe related to the Diyarbakir-headquartered Democratic Society Congress (DTK), an umbrella organization for Kurdish civic associations which she headed for several years.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his administration allege that Tugluk and her party act as a political front for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that is engaged in a decades-long conflict with the Turkish state over successive governments’ repression of Kurdish people and rights.

Prosecutors have separately asked for up to 22 years and six months in prison for the HDP Deputy, accusing her of membership in the PKK.

She is, along with HDP Co-leader Selahattin Demirtas and eight other lawmakers, one of the top figures of the Kurdish political movement currently under detention.

The party, Turkey’s third-largest, says the judiciary has been taking orders from President Erdogan.

In September 2017, while in jail, Tugluk lost her aged mother.

A funeral procession for Hatun Tugluk at an Ankara cemetery came under assault by a mob of about 50 people who were chanting anti-Alevi slogans, a religious minority that the Kurdish politician’s family belongs to.

The family then took their deceased mother’s body to the Kurdish province of Dersim where they originate from.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany