LONDON – Turkey has violated the rights of Abdullah Ocalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), during his detention on the prison island of Imrali, according to a European Court of Human Rights judgment published on Tuesday.
The conditions under which the PKK leader was held incommunicado for more than a decade had improved in recent years, according to the judgment. However, the life sentence imposed on him, which carries no possibility of release, was a continued violation of the European Convention of Human Rights, the Court found.
The case, before seven judges of the Strasbourg-based Court, was brought by Mr. Ocalan. The judgment allows both sides three months in which to appeal before it becomes final.
Imrali, a small island in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul, was the scene of the first tentative contacts between Mr. Ocalan and Turkish intelligence officials in late 2012 to sound out the prospects of a peace deal to end a three-decade conflict.
The peace process has been moving forward slowly as the government of Prime Recep Tayyip Erdogan deals with a raft of domestic challenges. But Ahmet Davutoglu, his foreign minister, insisted this week in an interview with Rudaw that it was on the right track.
Mr. Ocalan has been held at Imrali since his capture in Kenya in 1999. A death sentence imposed on him was commuted to life imprisonment in 2002, but he was told he would spend the rest of his life in jail.
For the first decade of his detention, he was held in solitary confinement and his only human contact was with prison guards under orders to limit conversation with him to a strict minimum.
The only inmate of the prison, he was confined to a 13 square meter cell. He had no access to a television set and newspapers were restricted. A radio with which he was provided could only receive state broadcasts.
The Court ruled by four votes to three that the conditions in which he was held up to 17 November, 2009 constituted inhuman or degrading treatment under the terms of the European Convention. There had been no such violation since that date.
It was then that Mr. Ocalan was moved to a bigger cell. Since 2010, he has also been allowed three hours a week to talk to other inmates who were transferred to the island the previous year. From January 2012, he was allowed a television set.
Mr. Ocalan’s conditions improved after the intervention of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, the CPT, an expert body established by the Council of Europe.
After its most recent visit to Imrali in January, a CPT team raised questions about family visits to Mr. Ocalan being limited to one every two weeks. It also expressed grave concern that he had not been able to receive visits from his lawyers since 27 July, 2011.
Turkey believes he used previous meetings to transmit instructions to the PKK. As a result, more than 35 lawyers have been arrested since then for passing illicit messages to a terrorist organization.
Mr. Ocalan said in 2012 that he did not wish to receive further visits from his lawyers, in order to protect them against subsequent prosecution. During the CPT’s January visit, however, he indicated he wanted such visits to resume.
Many Kurds in Turkey believe an amnesty for the PKK and its founder should be an integral part of an eventual peace deal.
The ruling delivered on Tuesday found that, while Turkey regularly announced general or partial amnesties, the Court knew of no plans in regard to Mr. Ocalan that offered him a prospect of ever being released.
