ANKARA (Middle East Eye) – Turkey’s supreme court of appeals has upheld a prison sentence for the head of the Istanbul branch of the country’s main opposition party, in a move seen as another crackdown on opponents ahead of next year’s presidential election.
The top court on Thursday approved the conviction of Canan Kaftancioglu, of the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP), on three counts with a prison term of four years, 11 months, and 20 days.
It was not immediately clear if the ruling means Kaftancioglu, 50, will be jailed right away.
The CHP is the second-largest party in the Turkish parliament, holding 135 seats.
In 2019, Kaftancioglu was sentenced to nearly 10 years in jail on a range of charges including “terrorist propaganda” and insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The charges related mostly to tweets Kaftancioglu posted between 2012 and 2017. She had been free pending the appeals.
Among the tweets used by the prosecution against Kaftancioglu, was one in which she criticized the death of a 14-year-old boy hit by a tear gas grenade during the mass “Gezi Park” protests of 2013.
Kaftancioglu, a doctor by profession, played a key role in the shock victory of the CHP’s Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu in 2019 - the first time Erdogan’s party had lost power in Turkey’s biggest city for 25 years.
Kaftancioglu “is my comrade with whom we are striding together to change Istanbul,” Imamoglu stated on Twitter. “I find this decision political and condemn it. I stand by our chairwoman.”
Shortly after the Thursday court ruling, CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu called on his lawmakers to head to the party’s Istanbul headquarters.
“All lawmakers of our party immediately set off for our Istanbul provincial headquarters,” he tweeted.
Rights groups regularly accuse Erdogan of using the judiciary as a political tool, particularly after thousands of judges were purged in the wake of an attempted coup in 2016.
Erdogan railed against Kaftancioglu after she was appointed to the Istanbul chair in 2016.