Following the revocation of HDP deputy Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu’s parliamentary membership on Wednesday, the parliamentary group of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) has launched a "justice vigil" in the Turkish parliament in Ankara. Gergerlioğlu and other faction members are staying in the HDP's meeting room. The MP is threatened with immediate arrest if he leaves the building, although the case against him is still pending before the Constitutional Court.

The HDP parliamentary group had initially protested for hours in the plenary hall after the court's verdict was read out in parliament, revoking Gergerlioğlu's deputy mandate, and had moved to its meeting room in the evening. Gergerlioğlu had already come to parliament with a packed bag in case of his arrest. On Thursday morning, the 55-year-old announced that he would continue his resistance to the unlawful action against him. He said he had not committed any crime and continued to consider himself an elected deputy: "The parliamentary presidency has violated the constitution and the principle of immunity. I still feel like an MP."

Background

The basis of the charges against Gergerlioğlu was initially a message of peace. The politician, who is actually a doctor by profession and a specialist in lung diseases, became involved with the peace platform in Kocaeli after the peace negotiations with the Kurdish movement were unilaterally ended by the Turkish government in 2015. On the initiative's social media accounts, Gergerlioğlu posted peace messages almost daily, including on Oct. 9, 2016, when he posted a photo showing a posed scene during a 2015 World Day of Peace event: several women can be seen, with two coffins in the foreground. In one, a Turkish soldier, in the other a PKK fighter, who can be identified by corresponding flags on the coffins. Under the picture, Gergerlioğlu wrote: "This war exhausts society. One child joins the army, another joins the PKK, both die. Wouldn't it be better if the two didn't lie next to each other as corpses, but lived as equals, shoulder to shoulder?"

As a result, Gergerlioğlu fell on the radar of right-wing journalists and politicians, who instigated a smear campaign against him. In the same week, an investigation was opened against the doctor, followed by the suspension of his civil servant status, which resulted in his dismissal by emergency decree. In the course of the investigative proceedings initiated in 2017, further "evidence" against the 55-year-old eventually emerged: The public prosecutor's office retroactively reviewed Gergerlioğlus's articles for half a year, which he had written for the online newspaper T24 at the time, and included, among other things, a quote ("If the state took one step toward us, peace would come in as little as a month") from a PKK statement in the indictment. Although it was demonstrably not a statement by the politician, it was nevertheless deemed terrorist propaganda. So was a column titled "Peace for Colombia - Why can't it be done in Turkey?" In January 2019, the politician was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. The sentence was confirmed by the Court of Cassation in February this year.