Trials of Selahattin Demirtaş
Open-knowledge reference entry
Selahattin Demirtaş is a politician of the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) and faced several trials since he was arrested in November 2016. He was accused of having established and lead a terrorist organization, propagandizing for a terrorist organization, or being a leading member of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). He was sentenced several times since, but two of them were overturned and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled for his release. He faces trials for over a hundred charges and is threatened with a 142 years imprisonment.
Trials in Turkey
Newroz speech trial
At the Newroz celebration of 2013 during the peace process between the PKK and Turkey, Selahattin Demirtaş and HDP MP Sırrı Süreyya Önder both held a speech. While Demirtaş was absent in the hearing of April 2018, Önder defended himself that the police has mistranslated his speech. For their speeches Demirtaş was sentenced to 4 years and 8 months for having praised the Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, while Önder was sentenced to 3 years and 6 months in the same trial in September 2018. In May 2020, the Court of Cassation overturned the verdict.
Main case
Demirtaş was arrested on the 4 November 2016 and held in pre-trial detention until his trial begun in December 2017 in the Sincan prison. In this trial, which comprises the 31 summaries of proceedings assembled during his tenure as a lawmaker in parliament, he is accused of various offenses like making terrorist propaganda, inciting hate and crime in public to being a leader of a terrorist organization.
“Trials of Selahattin Demirtaş” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Trials, Selahattin and Demirtaş can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Trials of Selahattin Demirtaş” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Trials, Selahattin and Demirtaş provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q116449450. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2013, 2018 and 2020.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Trials of Selahattin Demirtaş”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Trials of Selahattin Demirtaş primary sources, Trials of Selahattin Demirtaş archive and Trials research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Trials of Selahattin Demirtaş”?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Trials of Selahattin Demirtaş” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.