Turkey’s Constitutional Court rejected on Thursday an individual application by imprisoned pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş to the court, in which he said his rights had been violated.
Demirtaş had applied to the Constitutional Court by saying that “His rights were violated on the grounds that his arrest, his detention and arrest measures that were imposed upon him were not legal and that his access to the investigation file was restricted, that the offenses subject to detention were related to the freedom of expression and actions within political activity and that he could not fulfill his duty as a deputy due to his pre-trial detention.”
The Second Chamber of the Constitutional Court had ruled on December 6, 2017 to refer his individual application to the General Assembly of the top court in accordance with the Constitutional Court’s Rules of Procedure on the basis of the nature of the application.
The General Assembly of the Constitutional Court handled Demirtaş’s application on Thursday and ruled that the individual application on the claim of his “arrest and detention were unlawful” is “unacceptable” on the basis of the appeal opportunities have not been exhausted yet, while the court has also assessed his other claims as “baseless.”
HDP co-chair Demirtaş has been in jail since Nov. 4, 2016, along with eight other HDP deputies including Figen Yüksekdağ, the party’s former co-chair.
