Members of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party said after meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday that the two sides reaffirmed a shared will to keep a new peace initiative moving and urged Turkey’s parliament, ministries and public institutions to speed up “concrete” steps tied to the peace efforts, Turkish Minute reported.
Erdoğan met with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) figures who are authorized to visit Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Öcalan has been held since 1999 in a prison on İmralı Island in the Sea of Marmara.
Turkey and its Western allies designate the PKK as a terrorist organization.
The current peace initiative began after Öcalan issued a call on February 27, 2025, urging the PKK to lay down its arms and disband, a message delivered publicly by DEM Party politicians after visiting him on the island.
The DEM Party delegation, lawmaker Pervin Buldan and former lawmaker Mithat Sancar, said they discussed regional developments and how they could affect what the government calls the “Terrorism-free Turkey” initiative, while the DEM Party describes it as a “democratic society process,” a label meant to emphasize legal and political reforms along with an end to violence.
The meeting came as the Turkish Parliament’s National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy Commission moved toward the final stage of a report expected to outline next steps. Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş said a draft text prepared by a five-member working group representing parties on the commission was circulated to those representatives for review and that the commission aimed to complete its work in the coming days.
The report is expected to avoid direct language about the “right to hope,” a term used in European human rights law debates over whether people serving aggravated life sentences must have a realistic possibility of release after a long period of time, but instead refers more broadly to European Court of Human Rights case law and universal legal principles.
The DEM Party has long insisted on legal steps incorporating the right to hope into Turkish law, to pave the way for the release of PKK leader Öcalan, who has served 27 years of a life sentence.
Erdoğan has portrayed the talks as a new phase in efforts to end the conflict between the PKK and the state, which has lasted for decades and has killed tens of thousands of people, while critics and rights groups have questioned whether Ankara will pair any steps to disarm with changes on rights, legal safeguards and political space for Kurdish politics.
