Cihan Erdal, a promising Turkish academic at Canada’s Carleton University with an unshakeable faith in his country’s future, never imagined he would mark his 32nd birthday away from his loved ones in a dark prison cell in the Turkish capital, Ankara, facing a potential life sentence.

Erdal, who is openly gay, is among 20 politicians, lawyers and civil society activists who were detained in nationwide raids Sept. 25 over alleged terror links.

Many were from the left-leaning and Kurdish-friendly Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The group has been the target of years of intense judicial pressure buttressed by the unremitting and very vocal vilification of its members by Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Many of the HDP’s top leaders, including former co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, and multiple popularly elected mayors are behind bars on a panoply of thinly evidenced charges that they are acting in concert with outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels.

HDP officials believe the detentions are part of a broader government effort to lay the ground for banning their party and that like countless other arbitrarily detained innocents, Erdal was caught in the judicial dragnet.