Wife of politician gets 2.5 years' jail for typo in miscarriage report in Turkey, charged with fraud

Tribune Web Desk

Chandigarh, November 13

The wife of a Kurdish politician has been jailed in Turkey over a typo in a medical report on miscarriage she suffered in 2015.

Başak Demirtaş has been charged with fraud after a doctor’s note for medical leave of five days from work that was issued during an appointment on December 11, 2015, was wrongly dated as December 14.

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.

Her husband, Selahattin Demirtaş, the former leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP), is one of the most high-profile of thousands of politicians, academics, judges and civil servants who have been jailed in Turkey in recent years in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdown on opposition.

He was imprisoned after his party won enough seats in 2015’s general election to destroy Erdoğan’s parliamentary majority and faces more than 100 charges, most of which are terrorism related. The politician denies all allegations against him.