Kurdish politician and former member of parliament Leyla Güven has been transferred to the Sincan Women's Prison in the Turkish capital Ankara at her own request. The 59-year-old politician was previously detained in a prison in the province of Elazığ. According to her lawyer, the transfer took place at the beginning of the week.

Leyla Güven has been behind bars since 21 December 2020, when she was sentenced in Amed (tr. Diyarbakir) to 22 years and three months in prison for alleged membership of a "terrorist organisation" due to her role as co-chair of the legal grassroots movement Democratic Society Congress (DTK). A few months earlier, Güven had been stripped of her parliamentary mandate. The prison sentence was confirmed in June 2021.

Last October, Güven was again sentenced to many years in prison, also in Amed, but this time for "propaganda for a terrorist organisation". She received eleven years and seven months imprisonment for her statements in three different speeches she had made as a member of parliament. About a year earlier, a court in Hakkari had imposed a five-year prison sentence on Güven for the same charge. However, this is not the first time she has been in prison.

Leyla Güven was first arrested in 2009 as part of the internationally criticised "KCK operations" and was only released after five years. At the time of her arrest, she was mayor of the Viranşehir district of Urfa. In January 2018, Güven was again remanded in custody, this time for her criticism of Turkey's war of aggression against Afrin in northern Syria. At that time, she initiated a 200-day hunger strike in prison in November for the lifting of solitary confinement conditions for PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned on the prison island of Imrali since 1999. In June 2020, Leyla Güven was arrested again, only a few hours after the parliament in Ankara had revoked her mandate and thus also her immunity. The reason given was the now legally binding verdict in the KCK trial. In addition to the trial for the alleged incitement of the people, other trials against Güven are also pending.