Former DBP co-chair Emine Ayna was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in Turkey. The 55-year-old is said to have publicly called for a political solution to the Kurdish question several times between 2011 and 2016 and also emphasized the role of Abdullah Öcalan in easing the conflict. She is also said to have spoken out in favor of improving Öcalan's prison conditions. A court in Amed said on Tuesday that all those speeches proved Ayna had carried out propaganda for a "terrorist organization". Ayna was acquitted of the accusation of multiple violations of the Turkish assembly law. The verdict is not yet legally binding.

The trial before one of the large criminal chambers in Amed ended without the presence of Emine Ayna. Her defense lawyer, Semra Balyan, pointed out to the chamber that the speeches criticized by the prosecution fall under freedom of expression and were made at a time when her client was a member of the Turkish parliament. She also gave some of the speeches in her role as chair of a pro-Kurdish party. Balyan accused the public prosecutor's office of deliberately criminalizing Ayna's political speeches in order to punish certain points of view.

The lawyer also emphasized the limited scope for restrictions on political speech in the relevant article of the Turkish penal code. State restrictions on expression can only be justified if they serve to incite violence. Ayna's statements did not contain hate speech or calls for violence. On the contrary, they included demands to solve the Kurdish question. Therefore, there is a lack of public interest in the prosecution, which is disproportionate and unnecessary, said Balyan and called for her client’s acquittal. The court initially sentenced Emine Ayna to three years in prison, but reduced the sentence by six months.

Who is Emine Ayna?

Emine Ayna was born in 1968 in Dicle, in the province of Amed. After graduating from high school, she was co-founder and later chair of the Istanbul-based women's association "Gökkuşağı" (Rainbow). In 2007, she stood in the parliamentary elections as an independent candidate for the province of Mardin and entered the Turkish parliament with more than 15 percent of the vote. She was co-chair of the Party of Democratic Society (DTP) until it was banned at the end of 2009. After the DTP ban, she joined the successor party, BDP (Party for Peace and Democracy). She stood as an independent candidate for Amed in the 2011 parliamentary elections and was re-elected. When the BDP renamed itself DBP (Party of Democratic Regions) in 2014, Ayna was elected as co-chair. Ayna did not stand for re-election in the 2015 elections. In 2016, she withdrew from active politics in response to the Turkish military siege of  Kurdish cities that claimed hundreds of lives.

Defendant in the Kobanê trial

Emine Ayna is one of 108 defendants in the so-called "Kobanê trial" and was in custody for around nine months in connection with the trial.