Turkey's supreme court of appeals on Thursday upheld a prison sentence for the head of the Istanbul branch of the country's main opposition party, a party official told AFP, in a move seen as another crackdown on opponents ahead of next year's presidential election.
In 2019, Canan Kaftancioglu, 50, of the secular Republican People's Party (CHP), was sentenced to nearly 10 years in jail on a range of charges including "terrorist propaganda" and insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The charges related mostly to tweets Kaftancioglu posted between 2012 and 2017. She had been free pending the appeals.
The top court on Thursday approved her conviction on three counts with a prison term of four years, 11 months and 20 days.
It was not immediately clear if the ruling means Kaftancioglu will be jailed right away.
The CHP is the second largest party in the Turkish parliament, holding 135 seats.
Rights groups regularly accuse Erdogan of using the judiciary as a political tool, particularly after thousands of judges were purged in the wake of an attempted coup in 2016.
Erdogan railed against Kaftancioglu after she was appointed to the Istanbul chair in 2016.
"They think they can scare us but we will continue to speak," she said back then.
Among the tweets used by the prosecution against Kaftancioglu was one in which she criticised the death of a 14-year-old boy hit by a tear gas grenade during the mass "Gezi Park" protests of 2013.
