A Turkish court on Thursday ordered the release of Merve Zayım, a 37-year-old religious education teacher who gave birth while being held in pretrial detention, after briefly sending her back to prison from the hospital together with her 2-day-old baby, Turkish Minute reported.
Zayım delivered a baby boy on Monday at Trakya University Hospital in the western province of Edirne, after spending the final weeks of her pregnancy in Edirne L-Type Prison. Despite appeals for her release, she was returned to prison on Wednesday with her newborn. Following a public outcry and a new petition citing health risks for both mother and child, the Eskişehir 2nd High Criminal Court granted her release under judicial supervision, banning her from leaving Bursa province.
Court documents cited her account that she had been confined in a 25-person ward, faced a high risk of infection, was unable to breastfeed due to stress and that her baby cried constantly, disturbing other inmates. The judges ruled that the restrictions were a proportionate alternative to detention and ordered her “immediate release.”
Zayım was detained on July 2 while attempting to flee Turkey. She had been sentenced to more than six years for alleged membership in the faith-based Gülen movement.
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.
Zayım’s conviction was based on her employment at a shuttered Gülen-linked school, alleged use of the encrypted ByLock messaging app and witness testimony. Her appeal has been pending before the Supreme Court of Appeals for more than three years.
Although her sentence is not final, the courts ordered her to be put in pretrial detention. Under Turkish law pregnant women and mothers with children under 18 months are entitled to postponement of sentence execution. But this safeguard does not explicitly extend to pretrial detention, and judges have frequently opted to keep women in custody despite international standards urging non-custodial alternatives.
Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a physician and lawmaker from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), had campaigned for her release. Announcing the decision on social media, he called it “good news,” adding: “For weeks we spoke out about Merve Zayım, who was just sent back to prison with her newborn. Today she was freed under a travel restriction. I hope the Supreme Court of Appeals will also overturn her conviction so she can raise her child in peace.”
Rights groups have repeatedly condemned Turkey’s practice of detaining pregnant women and mothers with infants, saying it violates both domestic law and international human rights norms such as the United Nations’ Bangkok Rules.
