Istanbul prosecutors launched an investigation into leading opposition politician Canan Kaftancıoğlu for alleged insults to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday after Kaftancıoğlu called the president a dictator, Gazete Duvar reports.
In a speech on Saturday, Kaftancıoğlu told youth members of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) that Erdoğan would go down in history as one of the few dictators to be deposed by democratic means.
The remarks drew outrage from figures in the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, who said Kaftancıoğlu’s description of the president flew in the face of Turkish voters’ will.
Erdoğan’s lawyers filed a criminal complaint with the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, which announced it had launched the investigation on Monday.
In the criminal complaint, the lawyers said Kaftancıoğlu had voiced “grave insults” against Erdoğan which damaged the president’s honour and dignity and violated his personal rights.
Insulting government officials is considered a crime in Turkey. Observers of the country such as human rights organisation Freedom House say the flexible interpretation of the definition of “insult” has allowed the government to use this law widely to silence critics.
In the five years after Erdoğan’s inauguration in 2014, some 160,000 investigations were launched into alleged insults to the president, resulting in 12,881 convictions, Reuters reported in Oct. 2021.
Kaftancıoğlu, who spearheaded the CHP’s successful Istanbul mayoral campaign as the party’s provincial president in 2019, had already been handed a jail sentence that year after she was found guilty of insulting the president in tweets, as well as terror-related offences.
