JINHA

ISTANBUL – Turkish courts will retry Kurdish woman politician Sebahat Tuncel, co-speaker of the Peoples' Democratic Congress. Lawyers objected to her previous conviction based on inadequate evidence.

Sebahat is a former Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) parliamentary representative and current speaker of the Peoples' Democratic Congress. Last year, she was sentenced to eight years and nine months of jail time for "membership in an illegal organization."

Her lawyers have requested that her case be moved to the Constitutional Court, the highest court in Turkey, on the basis that courts have violated her rights in the previous conviction. Yesterday, Sebahat's retrial began.

Sebahat's lawyer Ercan Kanarexplained that the core evidencesupporting Sebahat's conviction was a testimony by an individual with a historic of sexual violence and murder who had mental health problems. Courts have also added the testimony of anonymous individuals to Sebahat's filethroughout the case based on what Ercan called "the logic of war with an enemy."

(gc/mg/cm)