A French court in Strasbourg has sentenced 17 young Kurdish demonstrators to prison on charges of vandalizing the Council of Europe (CE) building and attacking police officers when protesting CE’s silence against the isolation of Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), reported Euronews Turkey on Friday.
On February 25, a group of Kurds staged a protest in front of the CE building and called for CE’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) to take action against the isolation of Ocalan. Later the protest turned violent with three police officers injured and 43 demonstrators detained.
The court has given one-year prison sentence to three protestors, for organizing the protest, demolition and using violence. Other 14 were given sentences ranging between one and six months imprisonment. The court further charged the protestors for paying half of the damages to the CE, which claimed 296,000 €, according to the pro-Kurdish ANF news. All protestors were released after the trial.
Leyla Guven, a lawmaker of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), initiated a partial and indefinite hunger strike on November 7, 2018, demanding an end to what she calls the aggravated isolation regime imposed on Ocalan.
Notably, after March 1, participation in the strike has been spreading among Kurdish inmates at Turkish prisons, with seven strikers ending their lives so far in protest of the isolation.
Serving his life sentence since 1999, Ocalan has been held mostly in solitary confinement in Imrali, an island prison in the Marmara Sea. He has not been allowed to see his lawyers since 2011, his family members since 2014, and HDP lawmakers since April 2015.
PKK designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey’s largely Kurdish southeast in 1984, leading to a decades-long insurgency.
The CPT, with its full title the Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is a CE body, providing a non-judicial preventative mechanism to protect persons in need.
Prisoner Commits Suicide Amid Increasing Hunger Strikes to Protest PKK Leader’s Isolation
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from IPA NEWS https://ipa.news/2019/04/07/kurdish-protestors-sentenced-to-prison-by-french-court/
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