Socialist Solidarity magazine’s managing editor and a former member of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP) party council Sezgin Kartal was arrested on Thursday due to an article he wrote for the magazine’s April 2016 issue.
Kartal was detained at the İstanbul Courthouse in Çağlayan where he went to testify as part of another investigation into him. He was subsequently arrested because it emerged that an İstanbul court had handed down an 18-month prison sentence in January on charges of disseminating the propaganda of a terrorist organization, which was later upheld by the Supreme Court of Appeals.
The article that led to Kartal’s arrest was titled “Victory will belong to people who resist.”
Kartal was sent to Metris Prison in İstanbul where he will serve his sentence.
According to the Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF), a Stockholm-based monitoring and rights advocacy group, the number of journalists jailed in Turkey reached 228 as of April 1. Dozens of journalists have been arrested in Turkey in the aftermath of a failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016, which has made the country the world’s worst jailer of journalists.