The Turkish philanthropist and human rights advocate Osman Kavala faces indefinite jail time because he is symbolic of everything the government hates, said the New York Times.

After spending two years in solitary confinement in a jail cell, Kavala was unexpectedly acquitted in February of trying to overthrow the government by financing and organising the 2013 Gezi protests, but was immediately re-arrested on charges of supporting the 2016 attempted coup.

The New York Times said that even seasoned lawyers, used to decades of political trials in Turkey, had described the various charges against Kavala, 63, as “ridiculous”.

A Turkish prosecutor has appealed against the acquittal of Kavala and eight others over their alleged role in the 2013 Gezi Park protests, calling for convictions as charged, Reuters reported on Thursday.

Kavala is one of the leading philanthropists in the country and an energetic supporter of civic and human rights groups, but his case is just one of half a million prosecutions underway amid a government crackdown since an attempted coup in 2016.

The New York Times said Kavala had become the most prominent political prisoner in Turkey, and is a prime example of the state of injustice in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“He represents the leftist-leaning, secular elite, which in Turkey’s polarised society is the opposite of the president and his supporters. They are from religiously conservative, Islamist circles that were long sidelined from power,” said the New York Times on Thursday.

Some analysts also say that Kavala’s work with Armenians and Kurds is hated by elements in Turkey’s security establishment.

“Osman represents another culture,” Asena Gunal, who runs Anadolu Kultur, Kavala’s flagship organisation, told the New York Times. “Someone who is open, cultured, who speaks English, can talk to foreigners, active in society; something they see as dangerous.”

“Unless the president leaves office, dies or changes his mind, he is going to stay in prison forever,” Murat Çelikkan, a human rights defender and journalist told the New York Times.

Kavala was arrested in November 2017 over the nationwide protests that broke out in May 2013 over a plan to transform Gezi Park, a rare green space in central Istanbul, into a shopping mall.

The demonstrations quickly turned into a wave of anti-government demonstrations across Turkey, which Erdoğan describes as a foreign-backed attempt to overthrow his government.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found in December that the Turkish courts had held him without reasonable cause. “His detention was intended to punish him as a critic of the Government,” the court concluded in a statement, “to reduce him to silence as an NGO activist and human-rights defender, to dissuade others from engaging in such activities and to paralyse civil society in the country.”