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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Already serving a 15-year jail term, a former Kurdish MP in Turkey has been handed an additional one year of prison time for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Sebahat Tuncel was sentenced last week to 11 months and 20 days for calling Erdogan “an enemy of women and Kurds” in a 2016 speech, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Her comments against Erdogan were " “criticism of a political rival, which is within the boundaries of freedom of expression,” Reuters quoted her attorney Sivan Cemil Ozen as saying.
A former MP for the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), Tuncel was jailed for 15 years in 2019 on charges of “spreading terrorist propaganda” and belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
The PKK is a Kurdish armed group fighting for greater rights for the Kurdish minority in Turkey. Former HDP co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, as well as many other party leaders, are still behind bars after they were jailed in November 2016 for alleged links to the PKK. Several HDP mayors have also been removed from their positions.
Tuncel’s lawyer labelled the new charges against the former outspoken MP as an attempt to “prevent freedom and thought, expression and organization, especially the freedom of politics" and added that Tuncel had denied the charges.
The HDP slammed the additional jail term, saying they will not "back down".
“Those who rule this country are misogynists. And we women will continue to raise our voices against these policies everywhere, we will not back down from our struggle!" the HDP said on Twitter.
Insulting the president in Turkey carries a prison sentence of up to four years . Such cases rose by 30% in 2019, with 26,115 people investigated, some 5,000 facing court hearings and 2,462 jailed, according to data from the justice ministry.
“Insulting the president should not be a crime,” said Benjamin Ward, then director of Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch in October 2018.
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