Kurdish journalist Hamdullah Bayram was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison by a Turkish court in Urfa on Tuesday. The 2nd Heavy Penal Court found it proven that Bayram had been a member of a “terrorist organization” – meaning the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Despite the guilty verdict, the court surprisingly decided to release him from pre-trial detention. His release from the high-security prison in Urfa is expected today.
Hamdullah Bayram is an employee of the Yeni Yaşam newspaper and was arrested in March 2023 as part of an investigation conducted in Ankara and remanded in custody. In initial proceedings in October of the same year, he was sentenced to seven and a half years’ imprisonment for alleged membership of the PKK. After the verdict, the court ordered the arrest warrant to be lifted and imposed reporting requirements and a travel ban on the journalist.
Because Bayram was later alleged to have violated the terms of his court-ordered reporting requirement, a new arrest warrant was issued against him. The case was then reviewed by the Court of Appeals in the province of Gaziantep. The court criticized that a parallel case against Bayram had not been sufficiently taken into account and referred the case back to the criminal court in Urfa for a retrial. The court now imposed the same sentence on the journalist. Bayram rejected the allegations during the trial. His defense attorney, Resul Tamur, announced that he would appeal.