The charismatic Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtas was sentenced, Thursday, May 16, to a forty-two year prison sentence, notably for undermining the unity of the State during an outbreak of violence in Turkey in 2014. Prosecutors had sought life imprisonment for 36 defendants, including Selahattin Demirtas.
The former co-president of the HDP, the country’s main Kurdish party (now DEM), has been incarcerated since November 2016 in this case, already denounced by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The other former co-president of the HDP, Figen Yüksekdag, was sentenced to thirty years and three months in prison. Aged 51, Mr. Demirtas was being prosecuted for 47 charges, including that of undermining state unity and territorial integrity, and incitement to commit a crime.
When the verdict was announced, several DEM deputies held up portraits of the two leaders in the Assembly to protest against the decision. “We all witnessed here today a judicial massacre”reacted in a press release the DEM, denouncing a “new dark spot in Turkey’s judicial history”. The defense announced its intention to appeal the verdict, while the governor of Diyarbakir (south-east) decreed a four-day ban on demonstrations in the predominantly Kurdish province.
The “Kurdish Barack Obama”
In this lengthy procedure, most of the 108 accused were convicted, but a few were acquitted. The hearing before the Sincan court, in the suburbs of Ankara, took place in the absence of the defendants in pre-trial detention.
The violent demonstrations of October 2014, during which 37 people were killed in the country, began after an appeal launched by the HDP against the refusal of the Ankara government to intervene to prevent the Syrian city of Kobani, from border with Turkey, to fall into the hands of the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) organization.
Presented in the press as the “Kurdish Barack Obama”, Selahattin Demirtas, ran for the Turkish presidential election against the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in 2014 and 2018. For this last election, he had campaigned since his cell.
After his conviction in 2018 to four years and eight months in prison for “terrorist propaganda” in one aspect of this affair, the ECHR ordered Ankara to release him. ” as soon as possible “believing that his imprisonment was aimed at “stifling pluralism” policy.