Prominent Kurdish lawyer Doğan Erbaş was arrested on Tuesday and sent to a prison in Turkish capital Ankara over a 12 year sentence that was issued in December.
Erbaş was subjected to degrading treatment during the arrest. In a video leaked to the press, reportedly by the police themselves, Erbaş is seen with his hands cuffed behind his back and his head pushed down by officers, reminiscent of the mistreatment of Kurdish politicians in the 2009 mass arrests.
“Conditions for reverse handcuffing in the law were not met,” fellow lawyer Bişar Abdi Alınak said in a tweet. “Beyond physical and mental torture, this practice aims to humiliate and intimidate the Kurdish people.”
Turkish law allows reverse handcuffing only in extreme situations.
The case Erbaş was convicted in had started in 2016, after a peace process between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) failed, and the veteran rights defender spent nearly two years behind bars awaiting trial.
Erbaş faced terrorism charges over PKK membership and propaganda. Evidence of Erbaş’s criminal activity in the indictment was a list of his speeches as the Istanbul provincial co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the second largest opposition party in Turkey that is currently facing a threat of closure over terrorism charges itself.
The court increased his sentence, because Erbaş “had faced similar investigations and prosecutions before”, and referred to PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan as “Mr Öcalan”, in a manner that “attributes value to the organisation’s leader”.
The case remains at the higher court upon appeal by Erbaş’s lawyers, thus the arrest warrant was issued unlawfully, Lawyers for Freedom Association (ÖHD) said.
“None of our friends have bowed down, and none will,” HDP’s sister Green Left Party (YSP) Group Deputy Co-chair Saruhan Oluç said in a press conference in parliament.
“It is truly astounding that this government doesn’t see that they can’t achieve anything with these operations,” Oluç said. “They have seen time and again that arrests aimed to force people to bow down and step away from the fight does not work. They will see it once again.”
