Turkey opposition leader Canan Kaftancioglu gets nearly 10 years in jail for insulting president
- The court found Kaftancioglu guilty of insulting Recep Tayyip Erdogan in social media posts between 2012 and 2017
- The Republican People’s Party said the sentences must be confirmed by an appeal court before she can be sent to prison
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The charges related mostly to tweets that Canan Kaftancioglu, of the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP), posted between 2012 and 2017.
“The decisions are not taken in the courts, but in the (presidential) palace,” she told hundreds of supporters outside the court after the judgment.
Kaftancioglu, a doctor by profession, played a key role in the shock victory of the CHP’s new Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, earlier this year – the first time Erdogan’s party had lost power in Turkey’s biggest city in 25 years.
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“This trial is aimed at punishing Istanbul and those who helped the victory of the people of Istanbul. I will never give up my ideas and my convictions. They think they can scare us but we will continue to speak,” Kaftancioglu said.
The CHP said the sentences must be confirmed by an appeal court before Kaftancioglu can be sent to prison.
Among the tweets used by the prosecution against Kaftancioglu was one in which she criticised the death of a 14-year-old boy hit by a tear gas grenade during the mass Gezi Park protests of 2013.
Her tweets also criticised the response to an attempted coup in 2016.
She received sentences on five charges, including 20 months for “humiliating” the state, 18 months for “insulting a public official”, 28 months for “insulting the president” and 32 months for “inciting the people to hatred”.
Her “terrorist propaganda”, for which she was given 18 months, consisted of quoting a member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting a bloody insurgency against the state since 1983.
In their ruling, the judges said they were not suspending the sentences because Kaftancioglu had not shown remorse.
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They cited the fact she had recited a work by the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet after a previous hearing, which underlines her belief that the courts were not impartial. She repeated it on Friday.
“It is not my habit
To swear at a postman
A yes-man
Or to beat up a servant when I’m mad at the master,”
Kaftancioglu recited.
Rights groups accuse Erdogan of using the judiciary as a political tool, particularly after thousands of judges were purged following the attempted coup in 2016.
Erdogan railed against Kaftancioglu after she was appointed to the Istanbul chair in 2016.
“To insult our nation’s values, history and culture is not politics. Its name can only be enmity of the nation,” he said, highlighting her tweets against him, according to the Hurriyet newspaper.
The sentencing came just hours after Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul held a news conference in Ankara about an imminent judicial-reform package.
“Our first package of judicial reform includes regulations that further secure freedom of thought and expression, eliminate arbitrariness in arrest and differences in implementation,” Gul said, according to the Bianet news site.
