A former Turkish cabinet minister has publicly criticized the imprisonment of a teacher fired over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement who is raising her 1-year-old daughter in prison, the TR724 news website reported.
Ertuğrul Günay, who served as culture and tourism minister from 2007 to 2013, condemned the case on social media, saying the lack of justice undermines both the rule of law and national stability.
“This teacher — what crime written in law has she committed that justifies raising her baby in prison?” Günay wrote on X. “There can be no justice where innocent people are jailed for acts not defined as crimes. Where there is no justice, there is no prosperity — that’s why neither the economy nor politics is improving.”
Şeyma Aslan and her child were on their way to Greece to seek asylum in Europe when she was arrested by Turkish police on September 26 and are now held in Edirne L-Type Prison.
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 an 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.
Aslan was previously arrested in 2019 during Turkey’s post-coup state of emergency, spending eight months in pretrial detention with her then-3-year-old son. Her husband, Emrah Aslan, a doctoral student in nanotechnology, was also convicted in 2017 of alleged Gülen ties and served seven years in prison before being released.
The teacher’s case is under appeal before Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals. Fearing that her conviction would be upheld, Gündoğdu tried to leave Turkey with her daughter.
Her conviction was based on her employment at a now-shuttered private school linked to the Gülen movement, and the use of ByLock, an encrypted messaging application that was widely available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
Turkish authorities have considered ByLock to be a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite a lack of evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
Although the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) 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.
Aslan, who has a 10-year-old son as well as her 12-month-old daughter, is currently jailed in Edirne. Her infant daughter remains with her in custody, in accordance with Turkish regulations.
Under Law No. 5275, children up to age 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.
