{"id":24313,"date":"2018-12-04T20:22:33","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T20:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=24313"},"modified":"2018-12-04T20:22:33","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T20:22:33","slug":"turkey-upholds-sentencing-of-kurdish-politician-demirtas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=24313","title":{"rendered":"Turkey upholds sentencing of Kurdish politician Demirtas"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A Turkish appeals court has upheld the “terror propaganda” conviction of a former co-leader and\u00a0presidential candidate\u00a0<\/span>of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish opposition party.<\/p>\n

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said on Tuesday the appeals court in Istanbul had unanimously voted to finalise a September verdict against Selahattin Demirtas.<\/p>\n

The former Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chairperson was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison last September for a 2013 speech the court deemed was in support of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Demirtas, along with several other\u00a0former HDP members of parliament, has been\u00a0in jail for more than two years\u00a0<\/a>on the charge of having links to the\u00a0PKK, which has been fighting the Turkish army for more autonomy\u00a0since the 1980s.<\/p>\n

The Kurdish politician and others were arrested after their immunity as MPs was lifted in 2016.<\/p>\n

Demirtas denies the charges. His\u00a0trial began in December last year and he\u00a0faces up to 142 years in prison.<\/p>\n

ECHR judgment<\/span><\/h2>\n

Last month, the European Court of Human Rights said Turkey violated\u00a0Demirtas’ rights<\/a> to a speedy trial and ordered that he be freed after more than two years of pre-trial detention.<\/p>\n

The judgment added that his <\/span>imprisonment\u00a0interfered with his right to freedom of expression as he could not take part in parliamentary activities as an elected MP.<\/p>\n

Hours after the ECHR’s November 20 ruling, Demirtas’ lawyers applied for his immediate release, saying keeping the politician in jail would amount to a “restriction on freedom”.<\/p>\n

The application was rejected by a Turkish court<\/a> in the capital Ankara 10 days later.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Istanbul court on Tuesday also upheld the conviction and prison sentence of Sirri Sureyya Onder, a former HDP member of parliament. Onder<\/span>\u00a0was sentenced to three years and six months in prison,\u00a0also on\u00a0“terror propaganda”\u00a0charges.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\n SOURCE:
\n Al Jazeera and news agencies<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Turkish appeals court has upheld the “terror propaganda” conviction of a former co-leader and\u00a0presidential candidate\u00a0of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish opposition party. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said on Tuesday the appeals court in Istanbul had unanimously voted to finalise a September verdict against Selahattin Demirtas. The former Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chairperson was sentenced to four…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":24314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}