The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment (CPT), a Council of Europe (CoE) body, must fulfil its responsibilities to uphold ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms’ in member states and take action against Turkey in the case of jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has been denied any contact with the outside world in over three years, influential figures and institutions from Italy said.
The institutions, lawyers, journalists, and leading political and civil society figures joined to back a letter penned by the Freedom for Öcalan Campaign Committee and sent to CoE President Alan Mitchell regading Öcalan’s isolation.
Kostis Efstathiou, a Rapporteur for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), recently described Öcalan’s detention conditions as the worst case of inhuman treatment ever recorded.
“Öcalan is a citizen of an CoE member state who has been deprived of his human rights for twenty-five years and has been deprived of the right to see his lawyers and speak to his family for three years,” the campaigners said in the letter.
“We sincerely ask you to immediately send a delegation to İmralı island to meet with Mr. Öcalan and check his health condition. We would be very grateful if you would then encourage Turkey to allow visits from his family and lawyers to fulfil the obligations of the CoE and CPT,” they continued.
Lawyers and jurists amongst the signatories also reminded the CoE that Öcalan was granted the right to asylum in Italy at the Rome Court.
The letter comes as Öcalan’s lawyers were handed another access ban this week for their client, the Kurdish leader incarcerated on the high-security Turkish prison island of İmralı under conditions of absolute incommunicado for 38-months against international humanitarian law. The repeated bans enforced by the Turkish prison administration are deemed arbitrary and appeals are routinely dismissed.
Pressure has been mounting against CoE’s anti-torture committee to take concrete steps to end the inhuman isolation practices used in Turkish prisons, in particular with regards to the treatment of Öcalan, who is considered by millions of Kurds as their legitimate political leader and as the key to establishing renewed peace talks between the Turkish state and Kurdish forces.
The CPT has conducted inspections at İmralı, but has failed to release a report on prison conditions and the welfare of Öcalan or the three other inmates on the island. The secrecy surrounding conditions at İmralı prison starkly contrasts with transparency norms in other penitentiaries. However, the CPT requires the permissions of the state in question to release inspection reports, which the Turkish government has gagged. The CPT is widely accused of losing its credibility over this inaction which appears to endorse human rights violations in member states.
Last month, the CPT’s press representative, Jaime Rodriguez, announced that the anti-torture delegation to Imrali had in fact “spoken to all four inmates” in a September 2022 visit to the prison. The information, though perhaps providing a glimmer of hope at whether the 75-year-old leader is alive or dead, was received by legal representatives, family and supporters as a meaningless gesture to quell growing criticism.
The Freedom campaign for Öcalan kicked off last October, in a global attempt to bring the oppression faced in all four Kurdish regions and split across the national borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, to the fore. The campaign aims to advocate for the rights of Öcalan, who is the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), to meet with his lawyers and family and secure his release so he can contribute to the pursuit of a just and democratic political solution to the long-standing Turkish-Kurdish conflict, which has regional security implications.
