Grave mistake? Kurdish politician’s wife gets jail for a typo in miscarriage form in Turkey

Making a typo may lead to an apology in most parts of the world but Turkey seems to be an exception where a woman has been jailed for an error in a report.

In a case being denounced as an “appalling” political persecution, the wife of a jailed Kurdish politician has been sentenced to jail for two-and-a-half years over a mistake in a medical report on a miscarriage.

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For submitting an error-ridden medical report, a court in Diyarbakır has given sentences of 30 months each for Başak Demirtaş, a teacher and her doctor on Thursday, reported a local Kurdish news agency.

The case had begun in March 2018. The case relates to hospital admissions and two surgeries for a miscarriage suffered by Demirtaş in 2015.

As per her legal team, the teacher has been charged with fraud after a doctor’s note for medical leave of five days from work was issued during an appointment on December 11, 2015, but mistakenly dated as December 14, four days later.

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For the second half of the 2015-16 school year, Demirtaş took unpaid leave to recover.

Although the court board ruled that the hospital record book showing the dates she attended should be submitted as evidence to show the mistake was made, it gave the sentence without looking at it, Demirtas’s lawyers said after the ruling.

(With inputs from agencies)