The Governing Council of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), a global organization of national parliaments, has said in a recent decision regarding the case of a former Turkish opposition lawmaker who was arrested on a terrorism conviction in April that his continued detention was arbitrary and should be immediately ended, Turkish Minute reported.

Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a human rights defender and former MP from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), was stripped of his status in parliament on March 17 after conviction of disseminating “terrorist propaganda” in a 2016 social media post, where he commented on a story that reported on outlawed Kurdish militants calling on the Turkish state to take a step towards peace.