Caracas:
Former Miss Turkey Merve Buyuksarac has been
handed a 14-month suspended prison sentence for insulting President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan through a poem she shared on social media. She is the latest of
at least a dozen Turks to face such a sentence.
An Istanbul court found model Merve Buyuksarac, 27, guilty of
insulting a public official but suspended the sentence on condition she does
not repeat the act for the next five years, local media said on Tuesday.
Buyuksarac, who was crowned Miss Turkey in 2006, was briefly
detained last year for sharing the poem on Instagram in 2014. It was called
“the Master’s Poem” and referred to a high-level Turkish corruption scandal in
2014.
Her lawyer, Emre Telci, said he would file a formal objection to
the verdict and appeal her case at the Strasbourg, France-based European Court
of Justice. “These insult trials are being initiated in series, they are being
filed automatically,” Telci told The Associated Press news agency by telephone
after the verdict.“Merve was prosecuted for sharing a posting that did not belong
to her. My client has been convicted for words that do not belong to her,” ETelci
added.
Before the verdict was announced, Erdogan’s lawyer argued in court
that Buyuksarac’s Instagram post had gone beyond “the limits of criticism” and
amounted to “an attack” on the Turkish leader’s personal rights, the state-run
Anadolu Agency reported.
Insulting the president is a crime punishable by up to four years
in jail in Turkey. The law was used infrequently until Erdogan became president
in August 2014, since which time prosecutors have opened more than 1,800 cases
for insulting him, including against cartoonists, journalists and teenagers.
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