Turkish court upholds sentence handed to Demirtas for ‘insulting’ Erdogan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A Turkish appeals court on Monday upheld a three-and-half-year sentence which was handed to jailed Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtas for allegedly insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 

Demirtas, who has been in prison since November 2016 for terror-related charges, was sentenced to three years for allegedly insulting Erdogan while making a statement in Istanbul on December 24, 2015. He was given an additional six months for doing so publicly.

Istanbul’s appeals court upheld the ruling on Monday with a majority vote, saying it did not find any violation of law in the lower court’s decision, as reported by Turkey’s independent news outlet Duvar, which said that this was the maximum penalty limit a person could receive for insulting the president. 

After returning from Moscow, Demirtas had told reporters at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul that the Turkish President had “fluttered from corridor to corridor” during a conference in France to take a picture with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. 

Ankara-Moscow relations were severely harmed when a Russian warplane, which was flying over Syria, was shot down by Turkish forces for allegedly entering Turkey’s airspace in November 2015. 3 Demirtas had strongly condemned the incident and discussed the issue with Russian officials in Moscow. 

Demirtas was the co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) before his arrest along with several other party members for alleged links with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). 

Tens of thousands of HDP members, officials and lawmakers have been arrested in the last decade, especially following a failed coup attempt in July 2016 blamed on a former ally of Erdogan. Most of them have been jailed for terror charges.