Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled that the detention of Kurdish politician Leyla Güven after she was elected a member of parliament in 2018 was unlawful. According to a statement by the court in Ankara, the 57-year-old politician’s freedom and security rights were violated by the inadmissible maintenance of pre-trial detention. The verdict, dated 7 April, according to Güven's defense lawyer Reyhan Yalçındağ, has not yet been published in the government's official gazette.

Leyla Güven, who has been in prison for almost a year and a half due to a sentence of more than two decades in prison, has been behind bars several times in the course of her political career. She was arrested on 31 January 2018 for criticizing Turkey's war of aggression against the canton of Afrin in Northern Syria on social media and in press releases. In the presidential and parliamentary elections on 24 June of the same year, Güven was one of five candidates running for a mandate from prison. Leyla Güven was elected to the Turkish National Assembly as an HDP deputy for the province of Hakkari and thus enjoyed political immunity.

After the election, Güven's lawyers requested that she be released. The criminal court in Amed (Diyarbakır) then ordered the release, but the responsible public prosecutor lodged an objection on the same day. The magistrate agreed and remanded her to pre-trial detention before Güven was released. The MP remained in prison, and was only able to leave seven months later, in January 2019. The Turkish constitutional court has now declared this procedure to be unlawful.

Lawyer: All other court decisions since 2018 ineffective

Reyhan Yalçındağ is now again demanding the immediate release of her client. "I assume that all other court decisions after Leyla Güven's election as a member of parliament are also invalid given the ruling from Ankara. This means that it is now the cassation court's turn and the decision on Güven's long prison sentence must be overturned," Yalçındağ explained in a program on Artı TV. For a corresponding application, however, the constitutional court must first submit a written statement of the reasons for the ruling.

About Leyla Güven

Leyla Güven, who remains the co-chair of the grassroots Democratic Society Congress (KCD) movement despite her imprisonment, also attracted international attention in 2018 when she went on a hunger strike to demand the release of imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan to force. Öcalan has been serving a life sentence in almost total isolation on the prison island of Imrali since February 1999. In December 2020, Leyla Güven was sentenced to more than 22 years in prison for alleged PKK membership. A few months earlier, she had been stripped of her seat in parliament. The mother-of-two was in prison for the first time for a long period of time in 2009. At that time, she was arrested as part of the internationally criticized "KCK operations" and was only released five years later. At the time of her arrest, Güven was the mayor of the Kurdish city of Viranşeir. In March 2017, she was sentenced to over six years in prison as part of the KCK trial. The verdict was only confirmed in September 2019.