Relatives of Imrali prisoners submit visitation request

The relatives of the prisoners on the Turkish prison island of Imrali have applied to the judicial authorities for permission to visit them. For eight months now, there has been no sign of life from the Imrali prisoners, who are Abdullah Öcalan, Ömer Hayri Konar, Hamili Yıldırım and Veysi Aktaş. Whether family or lawyer visits; contacts to the island are arbitrarily restricted by the Turkish authorities.

The application for a visit permit to Imrali was submitted on Friday to both the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in Bursa and the prison management of the island prison in the Sea of Marmara. In addition to the relatives of the prisoners, lawyer Mazlum Dinç, who is also Öcalan’s proxy, is also demanding access to the island. A response from the judicial authorities has not yet been received.

Isolation system on Imrali

PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan has been held in a high-security prison on Imrali since he was abducted from the Greek embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in February 1999. For eleven years, the now 72-year-old was the only prisoner – guarded by more than a thousand soldiers. For eight years he was not allowed to see his legal counsel. The leader of the Kurdish liberation movement thus holds the “European record” for imprisonment without access to lawyers.

The last contact with Öcalan was a telephone conversation with his brother on March 25, which was interrupted after a few minutes. He last had contact with his legal counsel from the Istanbul-based Asrin law office in 2019. After eight years of interruption, a hunger strike led by Leyla Güven pushed through a first visit on May 2. This was followed by lawyer visits to Imrali on May 22, June 12, June 18 and most recently on August 7, 2019, with the last family visit to the island on March 3, 2020.

The political prisoners Ömer Hayri Konar and Veysi Aktaş have been in Imrali since March 2015, while Hamili Yıldırım was transferred to the island prison around four months later. They are equally affected by the isolation that prevails there. On several occasions in recent years, six-month bans on visiting Imrali have been issued, based on disciplinary sanctions against the prisoners from 2005 to 2009. The “Roadmap for Negotiations” written by Abdullah Öcalan in 2009, which was submitted to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as a defense brief, is also repeatedly used to prevent visits.