Ex-Miss Turkey gets 14 months jail for disrespecting President Erdgoan
A former Miss Turkey has been convicted of insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and handed a 14-month suspended prison sentence.
Merve Buyuksarac was sentenced by a court in Istanbul on Tuesday, for a poem she shared on social media in 2014.
The suspension of her sentence means she will not serve time if she does not repeat her action for a period of five years.
Buyuksarac was jailed for a brief time in 2014 for sharing the poem which prosecutors said insulted Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time.
The 27-year-old model’s lawyer, Emre Telci, said a formal complaint to the verdict will be filed and that the case will be appealed at the France-based European Court of Justice, the Strasbourg.
"These insult trials are being initiated in series, they are being filed automatically," he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying 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."
The poem, which was also posted by thousands of other people, was a satirical version of Turkey’s national anthem which did not refer to Erdogan by name.
According to Turkish law, insulting the president is punishable by up to four years jail time. But only after Erdogan became president in 2014 has it been regularly enforced with over 1,800 defamation cases being registered since then.
Last month, Turkey sparked controversy after filing a criminal complaint against German comedian Jan Boehmermann who read out a sexually crude poem about Erdogan.
German television aired Boehmermann's satirical poem that poked fun at Erdogan. But following the backlash from Ankara, in a widely criticized move, German Chancellor Angela Merkel permitted court action to be carried out against the comedian who was since placed under police protection.
ZDF has apologized for the poem and removed it from the internet, saying the poem "had crossed the line into slander."
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