Turkey Parliament strips pro-Kurdish leader of lawmaker status
With the removal of Yuksekdag from the Parliament the second largest opposition block HDP now has 58 seats.
ANKARA, Turkey (Kurdistan24) - The Turkish Parliament on Tuesday announced the removal of the membership of the imprisoned co-leader of the pro-Kurdish, opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Figen Yuksekdag over her conviction in a 2013 terror-related trial.
The Parliament's Deputy Speaker read a memorandum by the Prime Ministry ordering to trigger the process of stripping Yuksekdag off her lawmaker status per the constitution, citing a September 2016 decision by a high court to uphold the ten months sentence in jail.
Yuksekdag represented the Kurdish province of Van, on the border with the Iranian Kurdistan in the east.
A local court in the southern city of Adana had ruled the sentence in 2013 for Yuksekdag, a time she was not an MP, and seven other people on the charges of “disseminating propaganda on behalf of a terror group” for their 2012 attendance at a funeral of a leftist militant killed in Istanbul.
The Parliament's decision caused protests from other HDP lawmakers present at the session, leading to a break, said Kurdistan24's Ankara Bureau.
HDP's head of parliamentary group Ahmet Yildirim said it was "null" for his party.
Yildirim added that the prosecutors and judges who oversaw the trial of Yuksekdag were now in prison for alleged ties to the movement of the US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen whose followers President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses of masterminding a summer 2016 military coup attempt against his rule.
Police arrested Yuksekdag along HDP's other co-chair Selahattin Demirtas, and a dozen other lawmakers during night raids on their houses in several provinces in November 2016.
With the removal of Yuksekdag from the Parliament the second largest opposition block HDP now has 58 of the 550 seats.
Editing by Ava Homa