Turkey jails Kurdish politician's wife over miscarriage form typo
Source: The Guardian
Turkey jails Kurdish politician’s wife over miscarriage form typo
Başak Demirtaş and her doctor sentenced over ‘falsified’ medical report on her miscarriage
Bethan McKernan in Istanbul
Fri 12 Nov 2021 13.46 GMT
The wife of a jailed Kurdish politician has been sentenced to two and a half years in a Turkish prison over a typo in a medical report on a miscarriage, in a case denounced as an “appalling” political persecution.
A court in Diyarbakır handed down sentences of 30 months each for Başak Demirtaş, a teacher, and her doctor on Thursday for submitting a falsified medical report, a local Kurdish news agency reported.
The charges in the case, which began in March 2018, relate to hospital admissions and two surgeries for a miscarriage Demirtaş suffered in 2015. According to her legal team, the teacher was charged with fraud because a doctor’s note for five days of medical leave from work was issued during an appointment on 11 December 2015, but erroneously dated as 14 December, four days later.
Demirtaş then took unpaid leave for the second half of the 2015-16 school year to recover.
“The sentence of (Demirtaş ) to 2.5 years of prison for a mere clerical error concerning a medical record is appalling and seems beyond common sense. It just looks so political. It gives the measure of the worrying state of Turkish judiciary,” Nacho Sánchez Amor, the European parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey, said on Twitter.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/12/wife-of-jailed-kurdish-politician-gets-30-months-in-turkish-prison-after-typo