Prof Mauro Palma, former President of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), has written an open letter to the same committee, dated Monday 24 June and seen by MedyaNews, expressing concern about the continued isolation of Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in a Turkish prison.
Palma, who has witnessed Öcalan’s conditions first-hand, criticised the isolation as “an element of a conflict that goes beyond the person and becomes part of a dispute that has other forums for discussion”. He called on European monitoring bodies to re-evaluate Öcalan’s detention conditions, describing them as inhumane and unsustainable, and to ensure they meet European human rights standards.
In his letter, Palma urges the CPT and other European monitoring bodies to “take an interest in his detention situation again, to review it directly” in order to uphold these standards.
Palma described Öcalan’s detention conditions on İmralı Island Prison as an “inhumane and unsustainable detention regime”. He argued that in Öcalan’s case, imprisonment is used as a political tool, making him a “hostage” to political conflicts.
Palma stressed that Öcalan’s conditions in the prison severely limit his socialisation, so that “the very word ‘sociability’ loses its meaning and verges on total isolation”. This isolation is exacerbated by the remote location, which “makes it difficult, if not impossible, for one’s family members, loved ones and even one’s lawyers to contribute”.
Palma’s call for the CPT to act is significant. As an international human rights body, the CPT’s decisions have an impact on the Turkish state.
Last year, in an interview with MedyaHaber’s Serkan Demirel, Palma emphasised the need for a political solution and criticised Europe’s penal systems, urging the CPT and the Council of Europe to adopt a clearer stance on Öcalan’s conditions, which fail to meet international prison standards.
Marc Neve, another former Chair of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), also voiced significant concerns about the continued isolation of Abdullah Öcalan.
The campaign against Öcalan’s isolation, which started in 2023, is still ongoing. The latest events included the Dialogue Days from 15-22 June, which aimed at emphasising the isolation of Öcalan.
The full text of Palma’s open letter is given below.
To the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,
I have never believed that life imprisonment is a penalty compatible with respect for the person, especially when it is not possible to review it after a substantial number of years; that is, when it is a life sentence with no possibility of hope. Moreover, this position is in line with what has been established by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Even the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), which I have chaired in past years, while not interfering with the legislation of individual states, has always established the principle that every sentence should have a chance of positive reintegration into the community, thus giving meaning to the time of the criminal execution.
This principle is even more relevant when the person sentenced to life imprisonment ends up being the ‘slave’ of a political dispute that implicitly assigns to his detention a message function and a symbolic connotation that goes beyond the consideration of the person, his evolution, his subjectivity. The detained person thus ends up becoming almost a ‘hostage’ of something that transcends his detention behaviour and his possibility of interlocution.
Even more so when the conditions of detention reduce the possibilities of socialisation to a minimum, taking the form almost of segregation from the rest of the detainee population and reserving sociability to that minimal amount that makes the very word ‘sociability’ lose its meaning and verge on outright isolation. And even more so when the location of the place of detention makes it difficult, if not impossible, for one’s family members, loved ones and even one’s lawyers to contribute.
All of these elements coincide in the detention of Abdullah Öcalan held in the prison on the island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara, since the end of the last century and for almost a decade in total isolation, cushioned then by the pseudo-socialisation of a very small group of other people held under the same regime.
The conditions of aseptic detachment from the social reality that his detention in itself determines – and of which I have had the opportunity of direct observation, as well as of reading it in the Reports published by the CPT – make unsustainable, after many years, the continuation of a regime that has never been reviewed and that has become more and more an element of a conflict that goes beyond the person and becomes part of a dispute that has other forums for discussion, tension and possible settlement, which have nothing to do with the symbolic materiality of his being in that prison and in that detention regime. This is why I believe that the European control bodies must return to take an interest in his detention situation, return to check it directly in order to find a way for it to fall within the parameters of those standards that Europe wants to affirm in every country and for everyone.
Mauro Palma ;
President of the European Prison Centre, Roma Tre University
Member of the Board of Directors of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies
Former National Guarantor of the rights of persons deprived of liberty (Italian National Preventive Mechanism, under UN OPCAT)
Former President of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Council of Europe
