Selahattin Demirtas, the charismatic ex-leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party HDP. Photo credit: Best Nuce
ISTANBUL,— The release from a Turkish jail of Selahattin Demirtas, a leading Kurdish politician and former leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), is set to be blocked after a court on Friday ordered his arrest on new terrorism-related charges, the HDP said.
One of Turkey’s best known politicians, Demirtas has been in jail for almost three years and faces several other legal cases, mainly on terrorism charges and links to PKK, which he denies. He faces being sentenced to 142 years in prison in the main case against him.
A Turkish court ruled earlier this month that he should be released while the main trial continues and the HDP said Demirtas’ lawyers had on Friday applied for his release on parole.
Prosecutors then launched a new investigation into him and the other former co-leader of the party and requested their arrest, Demirtas said.
“The decision to re-arrest Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag is the massacring of the principles of universal law once again,” the HDP said on Twitter, following the court ruling.
The prosecutor’s office in Ankara was not immediately available to comment.
The independence of Turkey’s judiciary has been hotly debated in recent years, especially since a crackdown on the judiciary and other state bodies following an abortive coup in July 2016 and after the country switched to an executive presidential system in June last year.
“There is no judiciary, no justice, no law, no judges. Not just for us, for none of you,” Demirtas said earlier on Twitter, announcing that the new investigation had been launched.
Critics say courts are under the influence of politics. President Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party have repeatedly said the judiciary is independent and makes its own decisions.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has urged Turkey to process his legal case swiftly, saying his pre-trial detention has gone on longer than could be justified. A Turkish court in November 2018 rejected an appeal for his release.
Turkish authorities often accuse the HDP of links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is listed a terror group by Ankara.
The HDP denies such links and says it is being targeted because of its strong opposition to the president.
The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population. More than 40,000 Turkish soldiers and Kurdish rebels, have been killed in the conflict.
A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974 and currently serving a life sentence in Turkey, has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.
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