A 73-year-old woman was indicted for allegedly insulting a former lawmaker from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) through a comment on Facebook, according to a report by the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) on Thursday.
The woman, identified only by the initials M.V., commented on a Facebook post on February 12, 2022, that discussed allegations of plagiarism in a thesis written by then-AKP MP Ravza Kavakçı Kan while she was doing a Ph.D. in political science at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on a scholarship from the İstanbul Municipality.
According to the municipality, which was won by the main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) Ekrem İmamoğlu in 2019 after it was ruled by AKP mayors and their predecessors for around 25 years, Kan was recruited as a human resources specialist at Metro A.Ş., a subsidiary of the municipality, on December 16, 2008. On the day she was employed, Kan traveled to the US to earn a Ph.D. in political science on a scholarship from the municipality.
İmamoğlu previously said he found it difficult to understand why Metro A.Ş., which works on transportation, provided a five-year scholarship to one of its employees so that she could get a Ph.D. in political science in the US, adding that Kan did not perform the compulsory work at the municipality, required for four years, 11 months in return for using the municipality’s resources.
Kan returned from the US in September 2013 and was elected to parliament in 2015. During her five years of doctoral work in the US, Kan was paid a monthly stipend of one-and-a-half times the minimum wage in Turkey.
According to MLSA, M.V. defended herself, asserting that her comment on the news article detailing the plagiarism accusations against both Ravza Kavakçı Kan and her sister, Merve Kavakçı, were merely criticism made in the context of heated public discourse.
“I had no intention to insult; I simply expressed my opinion as a concerned citizen,” she stated, pleading for her acquittal.
However, the İstanbul Anadolu 50th Criminal Court of First Instance found M.V.’s comment— “Qualified swindlers, with shamelessness and impudence” — to be “of a nature that insults the honor, dignity and reputation” of Kan.
The court imposed a sentence on M.V. that was not specified by the MLSA, converting it into a monetary fine.
Kan is the sister of Merve Kavakçı, who was Turkey’s first headscarved deputy, elected to parliament in 1999 from the now-closed Virtue Party. Kavakçı caused an uproar when she wore her headscarf to a swearing-in ceremony in parliament in what some saw as defiance of the secular Turkish Constitution. At that time Turkish law banned the wearing of Islamic-style headscarves in public institutions.