Ferhat Çiftçi, a Kurdish journalist who was recently released from prison, said prison monitoring boards in Turkey act like “parallel courthouses” when deciding on parole for eligible inmates, asking extremely personal questions, the Mezopotamya news agency reported.
“They ask questions that do not even come up in trials, such as ‘Do you love your spouse or the PKK?’” Çiftçi said. “No inmate today can say with certainty when they are going to be released.”
The PKK is an acronym for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an armed separatist organization that has been designated as a terrorist group by Turkey and much of the international community.
Çiftçi was released earlier this month after spending more than 12 years in prison on terrorism-related charges due to his work for Azadiya Welat, a Kurdish-language newspaper that was shut down by government decree in the aftermath of a failed coup in 2016 over its alleged links to terrorism.
He was on the Human Rights Association’s (İHD) list of seriously ill prisoners as he was behind bars despite suffering from a neurological disorder called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP).
Çiftçi said he had seen inmates who were denied parole despite suffering from much worse health problems.
In recent years, many human rights defenders have highlighted the increasingly frequent denial of parole to eligible inmates by prison monitoring boards on such grounds as the inmates’ purported failure to “display remorse,” particularly in the cases of political prisoners.
Turkey, which is known as one of the top jailers of journalists in the world, is ranked 165th among 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 2023 World Press Freedom Index, which was announced in early May last year.
Turkey has seen an erosion in the rule of law, especially after a failed coup in July 2016, when more than 4,000 judges and prosecutors were removed under the pretext of an anti-coup fight.
The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is accused of replacing the purged judiciary members with young and inexperienced judges and prosecutors who have close links to the AKP.
In a development that confirmed the erosion of the Turkish judiciary, Turkey was ranked 117th among 142 countries in the rule of law index published by the World Justice Project (WJP) in late October, dropping one rank in comparison to previous year.
