In the trial against Kurdish politician and activist Sevil Rojbin Çetin, the prosecution demanded a prison sentence of 15 years before the 2nd Heavy Penal Court in Van. Contrary to the 43-year-old's claim, she had been involved "in a terrorist manner", the prosecutor said in his plea on Thursday. Çetin is accused of being a member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The Kurdish woman rejects the accusations and sees the trial as part of the Turkish state's political campaign of destruction against Kurdish communal politics and the women's freedom movement. The indictment is essentially based only on the statements of anonymous witnesses.

Sevil Rojbin Çetin is an activist of the Free Women's Movement (Tevgera Jinên Azad, TJA) and at the same time a member of the local politics committee of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). In June 2020, she was attacked in her flat in Amed (tr. Diyarbakir) by masked special units of the Turkish police. Before Çetin was arrested, she suffered a torture procedure lasting around three and a half hours, in which eleven officers are said to have been involved. They first set two dogs on Çetin, causing severe bite wounds to her legs. Then she was pinned to the ground by police officers who held a gun to her head and beat and kicked her. At the end of the ordeal, Çetin was stripped half-naked and photographed. The Kurdish woman, who suffers from uterine cancer, had to spend almost two weeks in police custody before a court ordered her to be remanded in custody. She is currently being held in the Diyarbakır women's prison.

Çetin's defence team believes that the arrest of the politician was prepared long in advance. The trial goes back to investigations that took place long before her arrest, they said at the last hearing. Çetin is not in prison for the first time. In March 2014, she was elected district mayor of the Edremit district in Van in local elections. Only two and a half years later, she was removed from office and imprisoned, along with about a hundred other mayors in the Kurdish southeast. At the time, Çetin was behind bars for around fourteen months, also on so-called terror charges related to the resistance for self-government in Northern Kurdistan. In 2019, she was imprisoned a second time, this time for activities for the Democratic Free Women's Movement (DÖKH). The proceedings initiated by the public prosecutor's office in Mardin have been combined with the trial in Van for a joint hearing and decision. The verdict is expected on 24 January 2023.