Council of Europe strongly urges Turkey to immediately release Demirtas

World 03:13 PM - 2021-12-04

Rights watchdog the Council of Europe strongly urged Turkish authorities to ensure the immediate release of opposition Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtas, it said in a statement on Friday.

Demirtas, the former co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), has been jailed pending trial since November 2016 on terrorism-related charges. 

He has been behind bars since then despite a European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruling in November 2018 that Demirtaş’s pre-trial detention was political and ordering his release. Turkish courts refused to implement the ruling, and a regional appeals court in Turkey subsequently upheld a prison sentence handed down to Demirtaş for disseminating terrorist propaganda.

Last month, a Turkish court even sentenced Demirtas's wife to 2.5 years in prison for allegedly submitting a false medical report when seeking unpaid leave from her teaching position in 2015. 

Demirtaş was an outspoken critic of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, before he was jailed. He ran in the presidential elections of 2014 and 2018 as a rival to Erdoğan. Demirtaş conducted his election campaign from jail for the 2018 election.

Today, the Council of Europe said it would launch disciplinary action against Turkey for refusing to free prominent activist and businessman Osman Kavala.

The Committee of Ministers decided on the move over Turkey’s repeated refusal to comply with a 2019 ruling by the ECtHR to release Kavala from prison, it said in a statement. The committee is responsible for overseeing the implementation of verdicts from the court.

The CoE will start the so-called infringement proceedings, used only once before in the organization’s history against Azerbaijan in 2017 over its refusal to release a dissident.



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