The wife of a jailed Kurdish politician has been sentenced to two and a half years in a Turkish prison over a typo in a medical report on a miscarriage, in a case denounced as an “appalling” political persecution.
A court in Diyarbakır handed down sentences of 30 months each for Başak Demirtaş, a teacher, and her doctor on Thursday for submitting a falsified medical report, a local Kurdish news agency reported.
The charges in the case, which began in March 2018, relate to hospital admissions and two surgeries for a miscarriage Demirtaş suffered in 2015. According to her legal team, the teacher was charged with fraud because a doctor’s note for five days of medical leave from work was issued during an appointment on 11 December 2015, but erroneously dated as 14 December, four days later.
Demirtaş then took unpaid leave for the second half of the 2015-16 school year to recover.
“The sentence of [Demirtaş] to 2.5 years of prison for a mere clerical error concerning a medical record is appalling and seems beyond common sense. It just looks so political. It gives the measure of the worrying state of Turkish judiciary,” Nacho Sánchez Amor, the European parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey, said on Twitter.
Her husband, Selahattin Demirtaş, the former leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP), is one of the most high-profile of thousands of politicians, academics, judges and civil servants who have been jailed in Turkey in recent years in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdown on opposition.
He was imprisoned after his party won enough seats in 2015’s general election to destroy Erdoğan’s parliamentary majority and faces more than 100 charges, most of which are terrorism related. The politician denies all allegations against him.
The European court of human rights ordered Demirtaş’ immediate release last year, ruling that his detention goes against “the very core of the concept of a democratic society”. In an interview in October, Başak Demirtaş said she and the couple’s two children had not been allowed to visit him since the pandemic began.
In a statement after the ruling in her trial, Demirtas’s lawyers said that although the Diyarbakır court board ruled that the hospital record book showing the dates she attended should be submitted as evidence to show that a mistake was made, the court handed down the sentence without looking at it.
“While the truth is apparent, sentencing Başak Demirtaş as a result of such a trial is openly unlawful and grossly unfair … It is the product of a mentality of collective punishment,” Demirtaş’ team said. “In spite of this situation, we will keep on waging our legal struggle. We still believe that the ruling will be overturned by the [appeals court] and justice will be served.”
