The new Turkey |
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| 23-Jan-2019 | |
Yıldırım was given 14 months in jail last year by the Muş 2nd Penal Court of First Instance for insulting President Erdoğan in a speech in which he referred to the president as a “hack sultan.” |
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27 February 2018 Kurdish MPs ousted from Turkey Parliament over convictions, insulting Erdogan With the removal of Ayhan and Yildirim, who represent constituencies from their home provinces of Sanliurfa and Mus respectively, the number of pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) MPs banished from Turkish national assembly rose to nine..................... .....“Head of our Parliamentary group Ahmet Yildirim was stripped of his lawmaker status for calling AKP’s leader Erdogan a shoddy emperor,” a statement on the party’s official Twitter feed read. It said the reason behind Ayhan’s expulsion was his tribute on Twitter for a Turkish leftist revolutionary, Aziz Guler, killed within the ranks of the US-backed Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) during a 2015 battle against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria. Last year, Ayhan received 15 months in jail for his paying respect to Guler on the grounds of “disseminating terrorist propaganda.” The MP had campaigned for the repatriation of Guler’s body from Syrian Kurdistan, a process the Turkish government stalled for two months. Yildirim had labeled the President as “the palace’s shoddy emperor” during a September 2015 speech he gave at a demonstration against the Turkish government forces’ human rights violations, including the killing of civilians at urban centers in clashes with Kurdish rebels. In mid-February, a Turkish court of appeal upheld an earlier prison sentence of 14 months for Yildirim for that remark it deemed as an insult to Erdogan. The court went so far as to ban him from politics, effectively preventing him from becoming a member of a party or run for any post in any elections, a first in modern Turkey’s history. His loss of the seat at the national assembly for insulting the head of the state is another first, creating a perilous legal precedent for the opposition figures as a whole. |
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20 Feb. 2018 - Seven HDP deputies face criminal charges
 20 Feb. 2018 The charges include “spreading propaganda for a terrorist organisation”, “publicly insulting the Turkish nation, military and security forces”, “praising crime and criminals”, and “insulting the president”. The HDP has been under tremendous pressure since it became the first predominantly Kurdish political party to break the ten percent electoral threshold and enter Turkey’s parliament in June 2015, narrowly defending its presence in parliament during the snap elections later that year. A resurgence of violence between Turkish armed forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in July that year led to a crackdown on HDP politicians, many of whom are accused by the government of being linked to the PKK, which has a long history of conflict with Turkish armed forces since it started an insurgency in the 1980s. The indictment against the seven MPs accuses them of praising the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and attending the funerals of PKK members, besides the terrorism propaganda charge. The indicted HDP deputies are Ziya Pir, Leyla Birlik, Nadir Yıldırım, Feleknas Uca, Ahmet Yıldırım, Ertuğrul Kürkçü and Alican Önlü. The Turkish parliament voted to lift immunities from prosecution from members of parliament in May 2016, leading to the arrest of a number of them, including former party co-chairs Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ. Source |
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20 Nov. 2017 - Criminal probe opened into six HDP deputies over attending PKK militant funeral
20 Nov. 2017 “As the Interior Ministry we have filed a criminal complaint about HDP deputies who attended the Diyarbakır funeral of Hülya Eroğlu, code-named ‘Delal Amed,’ who was one of the so-called executives of the PKK-KCK separatist terrorist organization and whose name was on a red list,” a statement from the ministry read on Nov. 19. The Diyarbakır Chief Prosecutor’s office stated that a criminal investigation was launched into HDP Diyarbakır deputies Feleknas Uca, Sibel Yiğitalp and Berdan Öztürk on Nov. 18 for attending the funeral, which took place on the same day. It added that a further complaint was filed on Nov. 19 against Ağrı deputy Berdan Öztürk, Van deputy Nadir Yıldırım and Muş deputy Ahmet Yıldırım, as well as “other attendants,” for paying a condolence visit to a funeral house in Diyarbakır. The prosecutor’s office stated that “the investigation will continue in line with further findings.” Source |
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The Turkish Parliament on Tuesday kicked out two more Kurdish lawmakers, Ibrahim Ayhan and Ahmet Yildirim, over court rulings against them, including one convicting the latter of insulting the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Seven members of parliament from Turkey’s Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) have been hit with a list of criminal indictments which includes terror charges, the Turkish news site Diken reports.
