Turkish authorities have jailed a woman accompanied by her 1-year-old infant as part of an investigation into the Gülen movement despite the fact that the law allows courts to postpone sentences for women who gave birth within the past 18 months, the TR724 news website reported.

Merve Saydan was taken into custody on November 13 and held at the Eskişehir police department for three days before a court arrested her and ordered that she be incarcerated at Eskişehir L Type Prison. Her 1-year-old accompanied her because the child still requires breastfeeding. 

Saydan’s arrest is part of a new case based on charges that she helped people dismissed by government decrees after a 2016 coup attempt. Investigators treated her support for these fired workers as an additional indication of links to the Gülen movement, separate from her earlier conviction that is still under appeal.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as some of his family members and inner circle.

Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following the abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.

Following the failed coup in 2016, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that remained in effect until July 19, 2018. During the state of emergency, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) carried out a purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight by issuing a number of government decrees. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.

Saydan was previously sentenced to over six years in prison during Turkey’s post-coup state of emergency based on her alleged use of the ByLock messaging app, an encrypted messaging application that was widely available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play. Her case is still awaiting review by the Supreme Court of Appeals.

Turkish authorities have considered ByLock to be a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite a lack of evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.

Although the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has in many cases made clear that use of the ByLock messaging app does not constitute a criminal offense, detentions and arrests of individuals continue in Turkey for their alleged use of the ByLock application.

Under Law No. 5275, children up to age six can remain with their mothers in prison when no caregiver is available, and sentences for women who gave birth in the preceding 18 months can be postponed. Rights groups say such postponements are rarely granted.