Selahattin DEMIRTAŞ

Image Credit: Mahmut Bozarslan/WikkiCommons

Writer and former co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş continued to serve a 42-year prison sentence imposed on 16 May 2024 on spurious grounds. Held since November 2016, he faced multiple criminal prosecutions by the end of the year.   

Sentenced in September 2018 to four years and eight months in prison for allegedly carrying out ‘terrorist propaganda’ during a speech he had given in 2013, he was further sentenced to three years and six months in prison in March 2021 for ‘insulting’ President Erdoğan. In May 2024, Demirtaş was found guilty of ‘aiding in undermining the unity and integrity of the state’, ‘incitement to commit a crime’ and ‘making propaganda for a terrorist organisation’, alongside scores of other HDP members, and sentenced to a combined total of 42 years in prison in relation to deadly 2014 protests across Türkiye, which began over accusations that the Turkish army stood by as Islamic State militants besieged the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane. The trial is widely seen as politically motivated (see Case Lists 2018-2025). 

At the end of the year, the  Türkiye authorities had yet to implement two rulings by the European Court of Human Rights –issued in December 2020 and in July 2025 – which found that Demirtaş’s continued detention violated his rights and had political motives and ordered his release.  

Politician and author Selahattin Demirtaş, born on 10 April 1973, wrote a collection of short stories while in prison entitled Seher (Dawn) (2017), which instantly became a bestseller and was translated into scores of languages, notably being awarded a PEN Translates award in 2018 by English PEN. He later wrote Devran in 2019. His latest book, co-written with Yiğit Bener, Arafta Düet (Duet in Purgatory) was published in 2024.  

Update: On 6 January 2026, a court in Mersin sentenced Selahattin Demirtaş to 17 and a half months in prison for ‘insulting’ President Erdoğan in 2015 speeches.