A Turkish court has rebuffed three attempts to free a 9-months-pregnant former teacher who could go into labor at any moment, the TR724 news website reported.
The Eskişehir 2nd High Criminal Court turned down motions filed on July 9, 11 and 14 that sought the release of Merve Zayım on medical grounds, citing an alleged violation of earlier judicial supervision orders. A fourth petition was lodged Thursday.
“My wife has already started having contractions. She is terrified of giving birth in prison,” her husband Furkan Zayım said. “All the legal conditions for her to remain free during appeal exist, yet she was jailed.”
Under Law No. 5275, children up to the age of six stay with incarcerated mothers when no other caregiver is available, but the same legislation lets courts postpone a woman’s sentence if she has given birth within the previous 18 months. Rights groups say such postponements are rarely granted.
Merve Zayım, 36, was detained July 2 after gendarmerie patrols stopped her in a restricted military zone near the Greek-Bulgarian border.
Her detention and subsequent arrest came after the Supreme Court of Appeals in late June overturned her original verdict of more than six years for alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, ordering a retrial. Fearing a fresh conviction, Zayım was trying to leave Turkey.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as some of his family members and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following the abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Merve Zayım gave a tearful statement via video link to the court.
“We tried to leave the country out of panic. I was once detained when my first baby was just 32 days old. That fear came rushing back,” she said.
Zayım’s ordeal has spanned nearly a decade. She was first arrested in early 2017, just 32 days after giving birth to her first child. Merve Zayım was convicted based on her employment at Samanyolu Gülbahar College in Eskişehir, a school shuttered by the government for its alleged links to the Gülen movement, as well as for the alleged use of ByLock, an encrypted messaging app that was available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
Although the European Court of Human Rights has in many cases made clear that use of the ByLock messaging app does not constitute a criminal offense, detentions and arrests of individuals continue in Turkey for their alleged use of the ByLock application.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
