Selahattin Demirtas was detained on 4th of November, 2016 when he was the co-chair of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and a member of parliament of İstanbul in Turkish Grand National Assembly. Until then, the government had already started 102 different cases regarding his political activities.
The first hearing of the main case was 399 days after his detention which he faced a possible sentence of 142 years by a bill of indictment running to 501 pages and filing 31 separate cases.
On September 2, 2019 he was discharged from the main case that he had been detained for 1043 days shortly before launching an application for a hearing to be held on September 18, 2019 in the Grand Chamber of European Court of Human Rights.
Public opinion was that he was going to be released however two days after the hearing in the Grand Chamber of European Court of Human Rights on September 18, 2019, on September 20, 2019 they sought his detention again in relation to another criminal action on October 6-8, 2014 Kobane protests- as a new case- that was actually within one of the cases from main case that he’s detained and he was discharged previously. Although it has been 469 days since his detention by December 31, 2020, the bill of indictment for this case hasn’t been prepared yet.
Since his detention on November 4, 2016, seven case files about Demirtas- who already had 197 hearings in different cities of Turkey- continue in different courts filing more than 30 cases in relation to even his declarations during the hearings.
Despite the ruling of violation of the European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Constitutional Court, he remains detained in Edirne F-type Prison.
