The Human Rights Association (İHD) has called for the release of a 74-year-old, seriously ill Kurdish inmate, warning that his health has reached a critical stage after repeated denials of a suspension of his sentence, the İlke TV news website reported.
İHD said Mehmet Emin Çam’s condition further deteriorated following his hospitalization in Batman on March 18. He was later transferred to Diyarbakır for suspected tuberculosis but returned to Batman T-Type Prison on Wednesday. Çam has been suffering from a brain tumor as well as heart and kidney conditions and is also experiencing vision and hearing loss.
Çam’s latest request for a suspended sentence was rejected on March 10. His legal team has submitted multiple applications for the suspension of his sentence, all of which have been denied on the basis of reports by Turkey’s Council of Forensic Medicine (ATK), which found him fit to remain in prison — most recently in December 2025.
Çam, a former provincial chair of the now-defunct Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), was first arrested in 2012, part of a crackdown on the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), a Kurdish political umbrella group that Turkish authorities accuse of links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). After spending 10 months in pretrial detention, he was released but later sentenced to nine years in prison for alleged membership in a terrorist organization. Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, and he was returned to prison on March 14, 2022.
Under Turkey’s Law on the Execution of Sentences and Security Measures, courts may suspend the sentence of a prisoner who, due to a serious illness or disability, cannot sustain life under prison conditions and who is not considered a serious or concrete danger to society. Rights groups say the provision is very rarely applied in practice.
According to İHD data, at least 1,412 sick prisoners are currently being held in Turkish prisons, 335 of them in serious condition, 230 unable to manage daily life independently and 105 requiring constant care.
