The individual appeal to Turkey’s Constitutional Court by jailed Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş was delayed due to one of the 15 judges not being ready to assess the case.
The judge said he had been “unable to prepare” for the case, Deutsche Welle Turkish reported. According to the German state-owned broadcaster, the unnamed judge often votes in line with government demands.
The court was scheduled to assess Demirtaş’s appeal ahead of a September deadline to implement a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling for the former Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chair’s immediate release.
Demirtaş’s argument for the appeal will be that his rights to freedom and security had been violated due to assize courts without effective remedies for appeal issuing the arrest order. The new date will be determined later.
The Council of Europe (CoE) launched infringement proceedings against Turkey in February last year due to its “refusal to implement” ECHR rulings from 2019 on philanthropist Osman Kavala, who is held behind bars since 2017 on what the top European court has called politically motivated charges.
ECHR has also issued similar rulings on Demirtaş, who was arrested in November 2016 alongside his co-chair Figen Yüksekdağ and several other HDP MPs over terrorism charges. The court said the continued criminal proceedings against the co-chair were politically motivated, and the European Parliament called the charges “unsubstantiated” and his arrest “illegitimate”.
The CoE Council of Ministers in its June meeting repeated the call for Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ’s release, and will “consider further steps” if the politicians were not released by its September meeting.
The infringement proceedings could result in Turkey losing its voting rights or facing expulsion from the Council, of which it is a founding member. The only other time the proceedings were invoked was against Azerbaijan in the case of a political dissident, but they were closed before the country’s expulsion when it complied with the ECHR ruling concerning Ilgar Mammadov and Rasul Jafarov.
Demirtaş faced a maximum of 142 years in prison in 31 cases related to his speeches as the leader of Turkey’s second largest opposition bloc and a presidential candidate.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has personally targeted the Kurdish politician numerous times, and a separate case at the Constitutional Court to shut down the HDP relies heavily on one of the accusations against the former co-chair, that he incited the street protests on 6 to 8 October 2014 known as the Kobane Protests where several dozen people lost their lives.
ECHR Grand Chamber cited Erdoğan’s comments that HDP’s leaders “must pay the price” and that the comments led to a harsher crackdown on Kurdish politicians, in its 2020 ruling for Demirtaş’s immediate release.
