A Turkish court has rejected a request to release dismissed academic Nuriye Gülmen and co-defendant Yasemin Karadağ during their retrial on charges of membership in a terrorist organization, the Medyascope news website reported.
The İstanbul 28th High Criminal Court on Tuesday denied the defendants’ requests for release at the first hearing of the retrial, citing the existence of a flight risk.
The retrial follows a June 23 ruling by Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals, which overturned the women’s 10-year prison sentences on the grounds of an incomplete investigation.
Gülmen was an academic at Selçuk University in Konya before she was dismissed by a government decree in the aftermath of a failed coup on July 15, 2016.
Gülmen and Karadağ were sentenced to 10 years in prison each in May 2022. Both have been held at İstanbul’s Marmara Prison since August 2020. They are accused of membership in the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C), a militant Marxist group designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that remained in effect until July 19, 2018. During this period, the government carried out a purge of state institutions on the pretext of an anti-coup fight by issuing a number of government decrees. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
Gülmen began a sit-in on November 9, 2016, and then went on a hunger strike to demand her reinstatement. She was arrested in May 2017 for alleged links to the DHKP/C, while she was on the hunger strike.
She was released for health reasons on December 1, 2017, on the 269th day of her hunger strike, during which she survived on water, herbal tea and sugar-salt solutions.
Gülmen was then sentenced to more than six years in prison but remained free pending appeal.
She was re-arrested on August 11, 2020, after she was detained in a police raid on the left-wing İdil Culture Center.
