Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeal upholds prison sentence against Yüksekdağ

Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeal has upheld a one-year prison sentence against HDP politician Yüksekdağ for alleged terrorist propaganda.

The Court of Cassation in Ankara has already rejected all points of the revision of the judgment against the 50-year-old with a decision dated 22 December 2021 and approved the decision of the judiciary from the second instance. This exhausts the legal process in Turkey. Yüksekdağ can now only go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which can question the verdict.

The verdict against Figen Yüksekdağ is based on a speech she made in Istanbul on 15 February 2015 on the anniversary of the capture of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan and his transfer to Turkey. In the subsequent trial in a criminal court, the public prosecutor’s office also accused the politician of praising criminals and violating the law on meetings. She was acquitted of those charges in April 2017.

Politically held hostage for more than five years

Figen Yüksekdağ, who was elected co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in 2014, has been held as a political hostage in a prison in Kocaeli for more than five years. She was arrested at the same time as Selahattin Demirtaş and other HDP deputies in November 2016.

In the main trial, in which Yüksekdağ faces up to 83 years in prison, the politician is accused, among other things, of founding and leading a terrorist organization. According to the public prosecutor’s office, she is also accused of having carried out “propaganda” for the PKK and of “separatism”. The 92-page indictment builds on seven reports incriminating speeches and statements made by Yüksekdağ in interviews and submitted to the Turkish parliament during her time as MPs to have her immunity lifted.

In the Kobanê trial, the politician and more than a hundred other defendants are accused of anti-state activities, 37 murders and dozens of attempted murders in connection with the protests against the Turkish government’s support for the Islamic State during the October 2014 siege of Kobanê.

Already convicted in several cases

In other proceedings, Figen Yüksekdağ has already been sentenced to various years in prison. In 2018, she received a year and a half in prison for “propaganda for a terrorist organization” for an interview she had given to Deutsche Welle three years earlier. In the report she described the PKK as a freedom movement.

In 2019, Yüksekdağ was also sentenced to one and a half years in prison for “insulting the president”. At a public prosecutor’s hearing after her arrest in November 2016, the politician described Erdoğan as a person “with many flaws in his political past”. The AKP leader was outraged in his usual harsh manner and immediately opened several proceedings against Yüksekdağ for insulting him. Some of these lawsuits are still pending.