Sep 5, 2017

As Turkey’s top Kurdish lawmakers continue to rot in jail over thinly documented terror charges, fellow politicians have launched a sit-in outside the Constitutional Court in Ankara to protest their plight.

Osman Baydemir, a spokesman for the country’s largest pro-Kurdish bloc, the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), said, “There is one reason that we are gathering outside the Constitutional Court today. … It is to demand justice.”

Baydemir noted that HDP Co-chair Selahattin Demirtas and 10 other HDP lawmakers have spent “306 days being unlawfully held hostage under orders from the [government].” The move is the latest in a series of peaceful protests organized by the HDP to raise awareness over the imprisonment of its parliamentarians and hundreds of other pro-Kurdish politicians, including 85 popularly elected mayors.

One of the HDP lawmakers taking part in the sit-in said the Constitutional Court had “failed in its duties of overseeing the fair conduct and implementation of justice in the country.” Meral Danis Bestas told Al-Monitor, “We have two appeals pending with the Constitutional Court. The first is related to the May 2016 stripping of the parliamentary immunity of our elected members. The other is to do with their November 2016 arrests. The Constitutional Court has yet to deliver its opinion and we demand to know why it’s taking so long.” The HDP wants to take the cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg but cannot do so until the Constitutional Court rules on them. “The delay seems like a deliberate attempt to delay justice,” Bestas said.

Justice has been in ever shorter supply ever since Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) imposed emergency rule in the wake of last summer's failed coup. The government has used these powers to jail tens of thousands, most over alleged links with the putschists. But emergency rule has also served as cover to crush the HDP and its affiliates and to erase all manifestations of Kurdish nationalist identity in the provinces and districts they ran in the mainly Kurdish southeast region.