A court in Szeged, southern Hungary, on Thursday sentenced a Kurdish couple to two years in prison and ordered them expelled them from Hungary for eight years for financing the activities of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Daily News Hungary reported.
The convicted man and his wife used to be members of the outlawed PKK in northern Iraq, which is classified as a terrorist organization by the EU, the US and Turkey.
The court also ruled that the defendants be expelled from Hungary after serving their sentences, which could mean immediate expulsion given time already served in pretrial detention.
The man had volunteered with the PKK managing logistics starting in 2009. The woman joined the PKK in 2010, at age 15, and met her future husband in 2014 in Syria. Despite threats from the terrorist group they fled and were married in Iraq the next year.
The couple arrived at the Hungarian border in December 2017, aided by human smugglers. They applied for asylum but were detained in March of last year.
In its justification for the ruling, the court cited the defendants’ young age, the nature of their activities in the PKK and the fact that they had been threatened by the organization, setting their sentences “well below” the minimum five years stipulated by law.
The court discontinued their detention because they had already served the minimum sentence before eligibility for requesting parole.