The co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party has been convicted of ‘propaganda for an illegal organisation’ and handed a ten-month prison sentence.

Selahattin Demitras was punished for making a statement about the detention conditions of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party, imprisoned in 1999.

Demitras’s lawyer Meral Danis Bestas said that her client’s statement should be evaluated in the context of the right to freedom of expression.