Pressure on the HDP has grown since Turkey said 13 captives – including Turkish military and police personnel – were killed by PKK fighters in Iraq during a failed Turkish military operation to rescue them last month.Īn outspoken critic of the human rights record of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, Gergerlioglu said the trial against him was politically motivated and aimed to silence him. The HDP said Gergerlioglu was punished for sharing on Twitter the link to a news story that included comments from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group that has waged a decades-long armed uprising in Turkey.
Several of HDP’s predecessor parties were closed down over the decades for alleged links to Kurdish fighters but were soon re-established under different names. The high court needs to approve the indictment before the case against the HDP can begin. The HDP, which has 55 seats in the 600-member parliament, denies any links to the Kurdish fighters. In a statement, the US State Department warned that if successful, the dissolution of HDP would “further undermine democracy”.īekir Sahin, chief public prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals, accused HDP leaders and members of “acting in a way that flouts the democratic and universal rules of law, colluding with the terrorist PKK and affiliated groups, and aiming to destroy and eliminate the indivisible integrity of the state”, state-run Anadolu news agency reported. Gergerlioglu protested the move and refused to leave. The move on Wednesday came as Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, a prominent HDP legislator, was convicted over a 2016 social media post the courts deemed “terrorist propaganda”.Īn appeals court decision confirming the conviction was read in Parliament, leading to his automatic expulsion from the house. A top Turkish prosecutor has filed a case with the constitutional court demanding the closure of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) party in the culmination of a years-long clampdown on Parliament’s third-largest party – a move the US said is “troubling”.
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