Sara Kaya, a Kurdish politician imprisoned in Turkey, has tested positive for Coronavirus. It is suspected that the 51-year-old may have contracted the disease during a hospital trip. For the past three months, Kaya has been in the quarantine ward of the prison in Tarsus, southern Turkey, where she had been transferred at the end of 2019. Due to a heart and blood pressure disease, she has to be treated regularly in a hospital. During the trips, she has contact with soldiers and guards. Her lawyers now want to obtain a release from prison, but in view of the controlled judiciary, they see little chance.

Sara Kaya was co-mayor of the Nusaybin district of Mardin. In 2016, she was deposed at the instigation of the Turkish Interior Ministry, followed by her arrest in January 2017. In June 2020, the politician was sentenced to 16 years' imprisonment in a contrived trial for membership of a terrorist organization, incitement of the people and abuse of office.

For more than a year, the pandemic has dominated the daily lives of people around the world, including in Turkey. Large parts of the population are dissatisfied with the crisis management of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government. The conditions in prisons, where the virus has been rampant since the beginning of the pandemic, are also frequently criticized. Civil society organizations report thousands of infected people, especially among political prisoners, in the country's 372 prisons. Turkey's prison authority, CTE, keeps quiet about the real extent of the Coronavirus situation behind bars and downplays the figures.