by Steve Sweeney

International editor

FORMER Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chair Figen Yuksekdag had her rights to stand for election violated after being stripped of parliamentary immunity, Turkey’s Constitutional Court has ruled. 

It said the 2016 decision was also a breach of the jailed politician’s “rights to freedom of thought and expression” awarding her 30,000 Turkish lira in damages. 

Charges leading to the removal of her parliamentary status were brought after she attended the 2012 funeral of Yasemin Ciftci, a leading member of the banned Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP).

Ms Yuksekdag was sentenced to 10 months in prison by an Adana court in 2013 for “making propaganda for a terrorist organisation” in connection with the case.

But the leftist, a former editor of the newspaper Atilim, meaning Leap in Turkish, was elected as a deputy for the HDP in the eastern Van province in 2015 while the case was under review. 

The court found that the stripping of her immunity was against the Turkish constitution, although it stopped short of demanding a retrial. 

Ms Yuksekdag was arrested following nationwide raids against the party in November 2016 during which a number of HDP parliamentarians and elected officials were targeted over alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The party has described the ensuing clampdown as a “political coup” with separate cases seeking its closure and the jailing of 108 leading party cadres. 

The HDP reacted to the news by vowing to “intensify our struggle for justice so that Ms Yuksekdag and all our elected officials regain their seized rights and freedoms.”

Some 20,000 HDP members and supporters have been detained since 2016, with at least 10,000 of them jailed along with more than 200 elected officials.

Since 2019, 48 of the HDP’s 65 elected mayors have been removed from office and replaced with government-appointed trustees.

Earlier this year the constitutional court found that another former HDP parliamentarian Leyla Guven had her rights violated by the state after it refused to release her from prison following her re-election in 2018.  

Ms Guven had initially been detained in January 2018 after describing Turkey’s military intervention in northern Syria as “an invasion.” 

in June 2020, Turkey’s parliament stripped her of her parliamentary status and in December that year the Kurdish politician was jailed for 22 years and three months on three trumped-up terrorism charges.