Turkey’s Constitutional Court has ruled that the state violated the rights of Kurdish former MP Leyla Guven by refusing to release her after she was re-elected in 2018. 

The former co-chair of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), an umbrella organisation for a number of Kurdish political movements, was first detained in January 2018 after describing Turkey’s military intervention in northern Syria as “an invasion.”

She was re-elected as an MP for the opposition People’s Democratic Party (HDP) that June, but the prosecutor’s office in the Kurdish-majority south-eastern city of Diyarbakir issued a new arrest warrant for her.