Top Turkish court upholds Demirtas sentence

ERBIL , Kurdistan Region — Turkey's Supreme Court of Appeals has upheld a 2018 prison sentence against the former co-chair of  the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Selahatin Demirtas,  the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya Agency (MA) reported on Friday.  

The four-year-and eight-month prison sentence was originally handed to  Demirtas in 2018  for a speech he made during Newroz celebrations in 2013, where he commemorated the assassination of three Kurdish activists in Paris, which Turkey deemed to be “making propaganda for a terror organization.” 

The ruling was upheld by the supreme court on Monday, the same day a trial began against the "Kobane protesters." Demirtas is also a defendant in the trial. 

More than a hundred people are being tried in Ankara for their alleged role in violence at 2014 protests against the army's inaction during the Islamic State (ISIS) group's takeover of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane. 

More than 30 people died, and over 700 were injured when the protests turned violent.

Demirtas has been held in jail since November 2016 for his alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), considered by Ankara to be a terrorist organization. He faces up to 142 years in jail. 

"The fact that the Supreme Court approved this decision on April 26, when the Kobane conspiracy trial started, shows that the decision is a part of the liquidation attacks carried out by the judiciary against our party and our elected officials,"  HDP Legal and Human Rights Commission co-chair Umit Dede said in a statement. 

He described the decision made by court as "null and void." 

In December, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered Turkey to release Demirtas, saying it found several human rights violations in the case of his detention. 

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed the ECHR ruling as "hypocritical" and political.