Cengiz Yürekli, part of a team of lawyers representing Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdish leader detained on the high-security Turkish prison island of İmralı since 1999 and in total incommunicado for the last 39 months, has urged European institutions to take heed of the United Nation’s (UN) response to the lawyer’s recently submitted application concerning prisoner treatment on the island.
“In a situation where any committee of the UN says ‘there is torture’, the Council of Europe (CoE), European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) cannot remain neutral,” Yürekli said.
Öcalan’s legal representatives from Asrın Law Office, who have been denied all contact with their client for over three years, on 17 May called on the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture to urgently intervene and urge Turkish authorities to comply with mandated international human rights law as a Council of Europe member state. A response has not yet been received.
Requests included an on-site visit to inspect the prison facilities, face-to-face meetings with Mr Öcalan, and the three other inmates on the island named as Ömer Hayri Konar, Hamili Yıldırım and Veysi Aktaş, family access to prisoners, on-going monitoring on prison conditions and public disclosure of condition reports.
Asrin Law Office made a similar application to the UN Torture Rapporteur in 2022, with regards to the then-relatively newly imposed incommunicado status of the prisoners, including the last point of family contact, an abruptly terminated telephone call between Öcalan and his brother Mehmet in March 2021. Speaking to Medya News, Raziye Öztürk, one of the lawyers, said the 2022 application was unsuccessful.
Lawyer visits to Imrali are arbitrarily banned, and appeals routinely rejected. A new six-month ban was imposed in May.
A CPT delegation visited Imrali in 2022 but Turkey barred publication of the inspection report. Furthermore Imrali was omitted from a CPT visit to Turkey in February. The secrecy surrounding conditions at İmralı prison starkly contrasts with transparency norms in other penitentiaries.
