Merve Buyuksarac, the winner of the 2006 Miss Turkey beauty contest has been sentenced with a 14-month suspended prison sentence after being found guilty of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

A court yesterday found that she was guilty of posting online in 2014 a poem that insulted the then Prime Minister.

Buyuksarak’s lawyer, Emre Telci, emphasised that she had not written the poem and that the case will be appealed in the European Court of Justice.

“These insult trials are being initiated in series, they are being filed automatically,” Telci told The Associated Press by telephone after the verdict. “Merve was prosecuted for sharing a posting that did not belong to her. My client has been convicted for words that do not belong to her.”

Legislation that forbids insulting the Head of State has meant that Erdogan since becoming President in 2014, has sued over 2000 people for defamation.