Turkey jails pro-Kurdish party lawmaker for more than 16 years
A Turkish court on Thursday sentenced a lawmaker of the main pro-Kurdish opposition party to 16 years and 8 months in prison, courthouse sources said, nearly a year after his arrest on terrorism-related charges.
Idris Baluken, of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), was first jailed pending trial in a terrorism-related investigation in November 2016. He was later released in January 2017 and arrested again one month later.
Baluken and other detained HDP members, including the party's co-leaders, are mostly accused of links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, which has conducted a decades-old insurgency against the Turkish state. All of the accused have denied the charges.
"This sentence reflects anger against democracy and the fight for freedom. Justice is being used as a baton," said HDP co-leader Serpil Kemalbay following the court ruling.
The arrests in the HDP drew international condemnation and former co-leader Figen Yuksekdag has since been stripped of her parliamentary status and replaced as co-chairwoman.
"Devastating sentence and continuation of crackdown on opposition voices," the European Parliament's rapporteur on Turkey, Kati Piri, wrote on Twitter.
The third-largest party in the Turkish parliament, the HDP has been hammered by a crackdown that followed the July 2016 coup attempt, as several of its members have either been detained, jailed or stripped of their parliamentary status.
