Hüda Kaya, a former member of the Turkish parliament who was imprisoned in November over 2014 protests in Kurdish provinces, has said she is being kept in a one-person cell, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported, citing the Bianet news website.
Answering reporter Evrim Kepenek’s questions, Kaya said she has faced several problems during her time behind bars, including the refusal of authorities to deliver her letters.
“These are known arbitrary practices,” Kaya said. “By now, half the country is more familiar with prison conditions than with the conditions of their own homes.”
“Tens of thousands of people are kept in captivity simply for calling for justice, denouncing war and hatred and promoting peace.”
A prominent human rights defender and a former deputy for what is now called the Peoples’ Democracy and Equality Party (DEM), Kaya is held in İstanbul’s Silivri district in a prison notorious for the mass incarceration of the country’s political prisoners.
She was detained and arrested in November on charges of “participating in an unlawful assembly” as part of the “Kobanê trial,” a prosecution concerning a series of protests that took place in 2014 in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority provinces in reaction to clashes between Syrian Kurds and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
The deadly 2014 protests erupted as ISIL militants laid siege to the predominantly Kurdish Syrian town of Kobanê. Thirty-seven people died in demonstrations against the Turkish army’s inaction in the face of the ISIL offensive.
The Turkish government accuses the pro-Kurdish DEM, then known as the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), of instigating the protests as part of an attempt at undermining the country’s unity.
Pro-Kurdish political opposition has been under an intense government crackdown since the breakdown in mid-2015 of peace talks between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed separatist group designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and much of the international community.
Many Kurdish politicians have also been prosecuted and convicted of having links to or spreading propaganda on behalf of the PKK due to their speeches, social media commentary or attendance at gatherings.