Council of Europe calls on Turkey to release pro-Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtas

Only two days ago, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) demanded the release of the pro-Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtas, former president of the opposition People's Democratic Party (HDP), arguing that the Turkish authorities violated his rights in the trial where he was accused of "propaganda for terrorist organisations".

"The court considers it proven that the applicant's detention, especially during two crucial campaigns related to the referendum of 16 April 2017 and the presidential elections of 24 June 2018, was intended to suppress pluralism and limit the freedom of political debate, which is at the heart of the concept of a democratic society," the ECtHR ruled. 

Yesterday the Council of Europe echoed the request of the European Court of Human Rights, and also demanded the release of Demirtas. "Selahattin Demirtas must be released and must resume exercising his political rights without further delay in a democratic society," the body said. 

Demirtas was imprisoned a few months after the failed coup d'état against Erdogan in July 2016, having been in prison for four years and facing a sentence of 142 years.

"The immediate release of Selahattin Demirtas would constitute (...) a strong and significant sign of Turkey's willingness to respect the judgements of the ECHR", as well as "its firm commitment to respect the fundamental values linked to its membership of the Council of Europe", said the Council of Europe. 

The judgement did not sit well in Ankara and aroused the fury of Erdogan, who criticised the ECtHR's decision as being "totally political" and "hypocritical". Furthermore, a few hours after it was made public, the European Court's website suffered a cyber attack, the origin of which is still unknown, making it inaccessible from 5.40 p.m. on Tuesday until mid-morning on Wednesday.

Demirtas is not the only eminent HDP figure convicted. In fact, on Monday of this week the 22-year prison sentence was known against her party colleague, Leyla Güven, who is also co-chair of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), an organisation that groups civil associations, political parties, women's and youth organisations, and religious communities in Turkish Kurdistan. 

Güven faces 18 charges including "inciting the public to join illegal meetings and demonstrations," "participating in illegal marches and not dissolving the marches despite the authorities' warning," and "establishing and leading an illegal organization. 

She had already been imprisoned before, in 2009 when she was the mayor of Viransehir she was sentenced to five years of imprisonment for alleged relation to the Kurdistan Union of Communities, which is considered as a terrorist organisation by Turkey. In 2018, when she was a member of the HDP parliament, she was in custody because of her criticism of a military operation in Rojava, Syrian Kurdistan. 

Due to her pro-Kurdish positions, the HPD is persecuted by the Turkish authorities who continuously accuse her of having links with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has led to the arrest of several mayors and MPs of the party. The pressure has come to the point that Erdogan's faithful ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), on which his parliamentary majority depends, has called for the banning of the political formation. 

After the local elections in 2019, the Turkish election authority prevented six elected mayors of the HDP from taking office and eight were dismissed, putting in their place the losing candidates of Erdogan's party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Some of them have been imprisoned, such as Adnan Selcuk Mizrakli, the dismissed mayor of the town of Diyarbakir.
 

The repression unleashed after the failed coup d'état of 2016 resulted in the dismissal and arrest of thousands of soldiers, officials, judges, prosecutors and academics accused of having links with the movement led by the preacher Fethullah Gülen, a former ally of Erdogan, the current rival, and whom he accused of being the intellectual author of the coup. 

The main opposition party, the People's Republican Party (CHP), is also not free from repression by the Turkish authorities, and even less so after its candidates won in the country's main cities, Ankara and Istanbul, in the 2019 local elections. 

In December 2019, the Mayor of Urla became the first local CHP official to be arrested after the elections, because of his alleged links with Gülen. A strange accusation considering the secular nature of the CHP and the Islamist nature of Gülen's movement. 

Another recent attack on the CHP took place last October, when a court banned the distribution of a book published by the party "for inciting hatred and spreading hostility among the population". The book reviews the links that existed in the past between Gülen's Islamist movement and Erdogan.

"Banning and confiscating books was a practice of the fascist regimes," the vice-president of the party, Seyit Torun, told EFE.